I don't understand the emphasis on "identity management" or "account portability". It has from the beginning been the single justification I have heard from the atproto people for reinventing the ActivityPub wheel.
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.