Show HN: A decentralized Internet identity system I'm working on.

OpenID with host identifiers? You want to create a directory service? Why? Why have others failed on this?

I commend you on the cleanliness of your reference implementation. It looks to be a completely by the book rails application. Anyone could contribute I am sure.

This is in sharp contrast to the tent guys who for some reason rolled their own web framework in ruby, leading to a very messy codebase in my opinion.

But more on topic, I am having a bit of trouble understanding what this service is going to do. What is the usecase? I think I got this from it:

1. A user wants an identity, so he registers at aka.nu (or other provider) and gets a nice url like tinco.aka.nu.

2. The user uses this url as an openid url to create an account on stackoverflow.

3. Stackoverflow gets information about the user by querying the url for meta information.

But.. this is exactly what openid does. I have an openid account at myopenid.com, and pointed me.tinco.nl to redirect to it. Now when you go to me.tinco.nl you see my public openid profile. And I log in to stackoverflow with me.tinco.nl as the identifier. And stackoverflow filled in some of the fields with information it got from myopenid.

What is your unique selling point?

I have been working on a centralized identity system at https://www.credport.org, and a question that is always looming my mind is:

Can identity systems be designed? Can they be explicitly built or are they a by-product?

Arguably, the biggest (consumer) identity systems out there (Facebook, Twitter, Google) have not been designed to be identity systems but ultimately turned out so. The biggest designed and most open solution, OpenID, has seen very limited traction.

In many ways, the broad majority of consumers probably don't care much about the great (and awesome) implications of identity systems and what would be possible if people were to work together by having a broadly accepted identity system.

The way we are currently going about it is to always have these implications in mind, but work extremely hard to provide value to both consumers and producers outside that realm.

It's not. We should be spending time implementing Persona rather than trying to come up with new identity solutions. Mozilla browserid/Persona is good enough or better than any other solution presented thus far, and has the best chance for adoption.

That's because people like you go out and reinvent the wheel and create yet another centralized platform instead of implementing an existing decentralized option. It's hubris. Facebook wants to manage my identity. Its no shocker that they don't implement an identity system that they don't control.

If you're not paying, you are the product. That includes your identity and that includes forcing others to go through them when they want your identity. That's annoying. Implement BrowaerID please.