Because

A) Solving Captchas isn’t protecting from abuse/spam anymore. People in countries with cheap labour costs are being paid (or forced) to solve these for spam networks. And nowadays, LLMs can solve them almost better than any human. Manual approval is completely infeasible once you have a somewhat larger following.

Tying comments to some form of account is at least somewhat of a hurdle for spammers.

and

B) Some people want to keep ownership of their data. As long as the comment is tied to my account, I can easily find, edit or even delete it. Try that with some comment you made on some obscure blog 5 years ago; which address you don’t remember and with an email address you no longer have.

Yes, webtrees should fit that description.

As someone who always had some kind of PDA (CASIO digital diary, Palm, Compaq iPaq) and switched onto the smartphone bandwagon pretty early (SonyEricsson P800/P910i, Qtek 9000, various Androids and various iPhones) … I don’t think I could enjoy the experience with a dumb phone. I love modern technology too much.

I once had a colleague that religiously only used a Nokia 3210 (the newer 3G/4G model). Which meant 160 character messages only. No emojis, no photos (as MMS were expensive). He was also the kind of person to use paper maps when driving - incl. stopping to look for alternative routes if some road was blocked or jammed. That’s definitely not for me.

The only way this could work for me would be to have some small PDA that can connect to the phone to use the Internet. And I appreciate that both devices have been merged into smartphones at some point.

“European Starlink rival” is a bit far fetched when there’s merely rumours that they might be able to offer a similar service. But that’s the stock market for you.