The excuse is simple: Microsoft is completely disinterested in maintaining two disjoint account management services (complete with all the security, auditing, and attack-surface headaches that entails).

Same reason one's YouTube login is their Google login is their Blogger login.

Google's login situation is because they tried to turn everyone into a Google+ user whether they wanted to be or not. Very different histories.

Not exactly. G+ was contemporary with / the spearhead for that initiative, but the desire to reify login was something Google was planning to do for awhile; they just used G+ as the focus project around which to pin the initiative. Nobody at Google was really thrilled with having three (four? five?) credential stacks, all with their own bespoke tooling, concept of what an "account" was, security stories, and administrative needs.

(... the one thing that came out of G+ that has stuck around is infrastructure improvements. A lot of the stuff the G+ team wrote to support Google+ behind-the-scenes is still used at Google for other projects now).

And yet it is ridiculous that I have to respond to a 2fa on my phone just to watch youtube on my laptop, every. time.

I have a paid yt account fine, but watching trivial videos is not in the same class with accessing my gmail, or managing my gmail, or even managing my own videos if I were a youtuber. I'm fine with being one identity (well no I'm not but pretend I am) but those are not all the same activity or class of activity.

Hm. I don't, and now I'm curious why. My login never asks me to 2FA on my regular devices.

I've had that problem on websites when I turned on the strictest privacy settings.

Maybe they are subtly discouraging you from using those settings.

This.

I held on to my youtube-only YouTube account for a long time, until I realized they'd shadow banned me and my comments to creators weren't getting through, for no reason that I can think of.

They also make it really, really hard to purchase the goddamn game for your kid and set it so they can play on your local server. I've done it three times, and just budget a full damn hour for it at this point, though I think the first time took more like three hours.

I mean, they did get my money so I guess why should they care, but I have no idea how people without an actual computer science degree and mumble years of experience un-fucking broken computer horse-shit manage to get through the process.

[EDIT] Oh, advice to any parents considering embarking on this: just lie about your kid's age. Don't try to use their child accounts. It makes the whole thing a much bigger pain in the ass.

And while I'm at it, may as well ask: anyone got a good list of allowlist addresses for Minecraft? I lock down my kids' laptops (you know, like a responsible parent is supposed to) but modern Minecraft is so full of friggin' spyware that it can't even launch without connecting to a bunch of never-seen-before IP addresses every time it starts, which means I have to go put in a pin multiple times to allow those new addresses every single time.

They make money by renting servers, self hosting is a relic from the olden days and Microsoft would prefer you just signed up for Realms

Sure, but even the purchase itself is painful. Having to navigate to an account management screen (which one? There are wrong ones that will be of no help) and change some XBox setting (LOL WTF?) to get local-network multiplayer working is just adding insult to injury, the core problem is that doing anything with Microsoft accounts including trying to give them money is bizarrely complicated in a way that zero other services I've ever used has been.

Aah, I can't speak to the Xbox experience at all, I've only used the Java edition on PC where they give you a jar for the server and you run it somewhere

Oh no, this is for the Java PC version, hence the "WTF?" at the option being buried in XBox settings (in the MS account management settings screens in a web browser, not while trying to do this on an XBox, which device we don't even own, all this was taking place on desktop and laptop computers)

Can’t say we had that problem but maybe GDLauncher is taking care of it

I believe it only happens when the age on an account is under 18. Also requires a Microsoft family account with parental controls to enable chat for <13. Some restrictions of this type can be modded out of the game, though IIRC the restriction on multiplayer is not possible to bypass due to servers checking each login with Mojang servers.

leetcode doesnt actually test for those competencies

I think you can use a different launcher.

Yeah, lie about the age indeed.

At this point it's just really a pain to make a server and have some of my sons friends join it. The parents need an MS account, then need to associate with the kid, they need to approve things that seems like you want to show their kids a gory horror film. It's like MS is the parent, or MS thinks I'm a bad parent. Come on, I'm the parent, I'm perfectly capable of guiding my kid online.

I don't do it anymore.