I think tech companies would've eventually attempted to build some walls around that and monetise it. Regardless of technology, the challenge is someone wants to "take this to the next level" - as long as it's investor driven, it remains "open" only as long as that brings more money or community good will

The public keys won't be stable as we would need to rotate them. We need both a stable identity and a proof of that identity. Security is not very user friendly and would have made the digital tech even more fringe. One of the reasons email and web took off was its comparative ease of use.

For messaging i think early skype had it sorted more or less , decentralised - widely used and intuitive identity. If it had been allowed to evolve identity maybe like email(matrix or even bsky) got federated with custom servers/identities and handles that could still interoperate, would be nice. Instead MS bought it and ran it into the ground.

I wonder what happened to Mozilla Persona.

That was super nice.

Maybe, but, in practice, email has been basically centralized too. For most people, it's just too convenient to get a gmail account for free, and forget about any maintenance headache.

But that only started when gmail launched with a deal that was too good to refuse (a mailbox that was huge for the time, and grew bigger over time). Before that most people just used the free email account they got from their ISP. That also comes without maintenance headache for the user and is at least somewhat less centralized

Yeah but you change your ISP more often (pricing reasons, moving to a different state or country) than your email provider.

Damn, in the last twenty years I've never lived at a place with more than one option for ISP (excluding satellite options).