I want a widely adopted decentralized identity standard to push user identities down the stack to make room for innovation on top. Thread:

Social networking evolved as an emergent property of the web — Web 2.0. It allowed people to create and consume content easily without building and maintaining their own websites.

Now, the social graph has become so fundamental to our relationship with information that it has begun to subsume the rest. A lot of people explore the web and get news primarily through social apps - they’re a sense-making infrastructure.

However, this social graph, which is so fundamental to our existence, is owned by a few companies and tied to specific interfaces. Your relationships and data are accessible only on their terms, through the interfaces they choose to build.

By decentralizing it, we could take our data and relationships with us when we leave a service, migrating across applications as easily as walking out of one store and into the next.

The social layer that evolved at the top of the stack could move down to a lower level. User identities, which companies currently manage through user accounts, could instead be tied to cryptographic credentials that browsers or secure hardware modules help users manage.

There's a lot of complexity around how to do DIDs and key management in a user-friendly way, but ultimately I think it's possible, and as long as something like a DID becomes a recognized standard, there can be lots of options for how they're used depending on the trust model.

Right now, browser extensions are a hack that let you get around some of the limitations of app silos. @metamask_io manages cryptographic keys and payments - but shouldn't this really be in the browser? @brave is taking a step in the right direction here.

I love the social bookmarking features of the @AREdotNA extension. And with everyone talking about @RoamResearch and sharing their knowledge graphs today, it reminds me of my recurring fantasy of truly social web browsing and researching -

To be able to access my social graph's public bookmarks and see their commentary across any piece of content across the web. I thought about building a browser extension that pulls data from Twitter to show who shared the link or discussed the content you're viewing and so on...

But I don't really want to Oauth with Twitter, or have a Roam extension, or whatever. I want an identity that I control, that links to other identities in a social graph I control, and have applications do all sorts of cool things for me without owning my relationships or data.

"What happens to business models?" Right now apps build a moat around their users and data. With data open and commoditized, curation becomes more valuable. All sorts of new ways to link and present previously inaccessible data across the web would emerge.

Google search is built on a decentralized protocol
We might unsilo the web, then consolidate at a new layer - perhaps these things are cyclical - but the point isn't to insist on certain network architectures, it's to unlock more knowledge and social sense-making abilities.