The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

If you want a general-purpose open-id style account, you visit a notary, and provide them with a fee and proof of your identity. You tell the notary how much information they can share (in particular, whether they can release your name to the internet, or just the "we verified this account is held by a real person" boolean).

The protocol would cover much more than passport info though. You could have a notary vouch that you're a licensed driver, or have a college degree, visited a certain country, etc.

That might cut through some flavors of online nonsense. It would also allow people to stay pseudonymous, and yet enable law enforcement to subpoena their identity, if they go on a killing spree, or hack a few million dollars worth of bitcoin.

Whenever I hear this I think, "What? No! That's the opposite direction we should be going." Identities that are hard locked to real people makes it so easy to harass, mob, cancel and abuse people. At least in the US, most employers are at-will, allowing for Viewpoint Discrimination.

Anonymity does have its issues. It also does allow people to harass with more impunity. But in many ways, it also exposes more of the deep self and the controversial ideas people have that they are less and less likely to discuss outside of anonymity.

Even semi-anonymous platforms like Reddit are going back on previous commitments to free expression of ideas; and the effect is that Reddit is becoming more one-sided/one-direction, just like the platforms everyone is fleeing into.

Always use your e-mail to sign up for things. I rarely ever allow applications to connect via social media/OAuth. There was a time on the Internet where we thought all identity providers could be interchangeable. I ran an OpenID IDP for years, but fewer and fewer sites allow OpenID logins:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-decline-of-openid/

I'd love to have SSO under my own control, and while it was theoretically possible with OpenID 2 things have gone backwards with OIDC with everyone supporting it but restricting login to just the big names (Google, Facebook, Apple).

I put together a simple stateless OID2/OIDC identity provider: https://gitlab.com/rendaw/oidle but I have yet to find a website I can actually use it on. I still have hope though.

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-decline-of-openid/