> That's why the WoT and strong set were important (before they violently collapsed, revealing that they weren't load bearing after all).
I hadn't heard they violently collapsed; do you have any links where I can learn more about this?
https://inversegravity.net/2019/web-of-trust-dead/
https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67ab921ffb4084c865b3618d695...
Also, as someone who went to a few signing parties: the strong set was probably never as strong as some people thought.
PGP doesn't do this: PGP key has a claimant identity, but actually verifying that claimant is left to the end user. That's why the WoT and strong set were important (before they violently collapsed, revealing that they weren't load bearing after all).
Other schemes do realize this, and it's why they make tradeoffs around trusted parties (CAs in the Web PKI performing domain validation, EV for code-signing, etc.).