People don’t even want you to play a video game in private now.
"Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Server.properties
The
online-modekey controls whether players without a Minecraft account (i.e. paid for the game) can join. It looks likeenforce-secure-profilehas something to do with chat messages getting sent to Microsoft. The history section doesn’t mention either of these ever getting removed.online-modewill become important when the devs decide Minecraft has reached end of life and shut down the authentication servers. Players who have a copy of the game client will still be able to play together by connecting to a server withonline-mode=false.online-mode=trueserves the purpose of limiting players to those who coughed up money for an account, helping to protect the server from ne’er-do-wells.