It's a bit interesting how the game culture here in eastern europe is different than what's in the west because of various reasons.
* We play on PC mostly
* Consoles older than: the PS2, Xbox 360, Wii are quite rare, not many people have an experience with them (exception for PS1)
* liking more "childish" titles like the nintendo ones is kind of socially embarassing unless you are a child
* But even then, children used to play more adult titles (HL and derivates, GTA, lol FIFA, Age of Empires and the like etc etc) right of the bat and barely any games aimed at chidlren
* obviously the PC titles were a lot of the times pirated
* If we're going even older, we've been stuck on Z80 -ish things for too long, until around Windows 98 era at least. not sure, am too young myself.

So now that Microsoft is screwing Minecraft over with the report feature and all I got reminded of something I used to use back when I didn't have Minecraft Premium.
https://mineshafter.info/
It's essentially an alternative login/identity/whatever server for minecraft. It lets you have a skin without premium only able to be seen by the Mineshafter userbase.
it uses its own launcher, servers can be supporting Mineshafter specifically in some way, but even on non-Mineshafter servers if 2 Mineshafter users encounter each other they will be able to see each other's skin.

Though it's quite old and it seems like it hasn't been updated in a while. But the concept of a third party Minecraft identity server is there