See this post. The work is sponsored by the NLnet Foundation

Lemmy core devs are actually employed full time to work on lemmy.

It’d be great to support identity based on a key hash, so that it’s completely decoupled from any instances. Maybe some time in the future.

I don’t want to upload anything. Why would they ever not allow that?

Yup, this is the worst thing about ProtonMail. They must patch this. Not being able to use my own GPG encryption when needed is crazy for a private & secure service.