This might be one of the closest things I've seen to actually being able to own your account - instead of having it beholden to an e-mail or a phone number you can't possibly own in any meaningful way.

That's pretty important in a world where the likes of Google can will just reject your login attempt with a valid password on the grounds of "we don't like you" and force you to "confirm" yourself using a phone number that's defunct since 2009.

Just curious, how is this different from something like a PGP key server?

Better than the eyeball-scanning ghouls.