DIDs Are Cool. We Didn't Need Them

DIDs Are Cool. We Didn't Need Them(inamoon.com)

9 points by mankins 74 days ago | 9 comments

It would be interesting if it would be possible to 'chain' or 'web' presences from one platform to another. For examle, your X profile could contain a string like "bsky:something fedi:someone@something.social", to create a one-direction link from platform to platform. Unfortunately, that linkage can be tenuous: Post-acquisition, there were rumors that folks on X were getting penalized for pointing people to other platforms.

One of the benefits of a DID-like is that it can be parsed. Lots of folks have probably seen the DOI, a pointer to a specific publication. Here are two that folks might not know:

• The ORCID (https://info.orcid.org/researchers/), a unique ID for researchers, and a place for researchers to provide information about themselves, their affiliated institutions, and their publications.

• The RRID (https://rrid.site), a unique ID for research materials & tools. You can identify a specific antibody, or a specific DNA sequencer, or a particular HPC platform.

These are all centralized repositories of things (researchers, plasmids, instruments, …), all with the purpose of making it easier to identify, find, and connect things.

spwa4 74 days ago |

If web identities become a real thing, the web will die entirely. Then it'll really be nothing but a mall.

mankins 74 days ago | |

Doesn't the web already have implicit identities? And maybe that's enough for some use cases. I guess that's my take away.

jiggawatts 74 days ago |

DIDs are the new NFTs: crypto enthusiasts desperately trying to find an excuse for why their blockchains are needed in the wider world.

The name "Decentralized Identifiers" tells you everything you need to know. It's just blockchain. DID backends include ION/Sidetree, Indy, and Ethr using BitCoin, Hyperledger, and Ethereum respectively.

mankins 74 days ago | |

I mean isn't this just a side effect of DIDs coming out a time when a lot of activity happened with blockchains? They came from w3c, a web org.

I guess my experience is similar to what you're saying though: we didn't really need that crypto layer to immediately gain value. But the way it compressed ids into a single namespace, that was useful.

xigoi 74 days ago |

Isn’t the whole point of DIDs that you can switch platforms without your DID changing?

dogmatism 74 days ago |

Is this AI writing? Maybe from an outline prompt? I can’t tell

We’re screwed

mankins 74 days ago | |

Nope, not an outline prompt. Just my early morning jumble. (We still might be screwed, but I like to think not!)

dogmatism 74 days ago | | |

I didn't think so, but LLM's have taken so many tropes of a certain style of writing: the bullet points, the contradiction to make a point (not this...but that...) that when I see that style, I automatically question it

But you made actual clear points, so it didn't really feel like it, but honestly I can't be sure anymore!