well, keybase got quite far - it could have been decentralised but they chose to centralise it for commercial reasons. but yes, decentralised identity is hard, hence us cutting that corner (and then getting abuse about being too centralised…)
And it is also the reason why I'd never considered signal for anything.
because it makes it easy for you to find contacts?
Re:XMPP, a comeback story
by johnisgood on Thursday November 18, 2021 @05:25AM
(#29263968)
I do not want people to know I use X when they have me as a contact.
I also do not want my account to be tied to my phone number at all, because my phone number is tied to a contract.
(Not a Matrix user so maybe help me understand here.) I think the reason why I have about 30 contacts (instead of like 3) on Signal is due to phone number discovery. It's not decentralized, which is of course subject to criticism, but exchanging & verifying public keys between O(N^2) people hasn't "taken off" in the X decades since it was invented.
> we'd have been better off waiting off for someone to build a decentralised keybase service and use that instead.
Do you have an example of any mainstream product that has ever achieved that, without either being partly centralized? Decentralized identity is really, really, really hard, and mostly the layer-8 implementation (discovery, name-squatting, impersonation, abuse, spam, key-management and exchange, etc).