It seems that accounts aren’t required to download models or participate in the torrent swarm and have a somewhat reasonable justification of needing a way to maintain model provenance, which afaik pirate sites also require accounts for uploads for similar reasons:

Hugging Face verification confirms that someone claiming a creator’s handle controls the matching HF account or organization. It helps prevent impersonation and preserves attribution as models spread beyond their original host.

It’s also reasonable to have a centralized API since a lot of software in the ecosystem has using the huggingface API as a default way of doing things, so that makes sense for the goal of resilience to huggingface getting locked down somehow in the future.

The gamification-ish features do seem a little contradictory with the stated “decentralized infrastructure” objective though:

Pirate Face is preparing community benefits for account holders, including free compute credits and exclusive model releases.

Also loses points with me for (as far as I can see) not publishing a code repo, and the writing on the website having a very AI generated style which combined with the goals and features being a bit all over the place makes it tough to get a read on the project’s ethos and intentions.