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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

We have had a myriad attempts at decentralized (and/or federated) identity and all of them failed because at the end of the day MySpace^W Facebook/Apple/Google/Whatever-todays-WWW-giant-is prefers to be at the center of your online identity, not at the periphery.

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This has been one of the most infuriating things about the internet maturing or whatever it's doing. All the big players trying centralize and tie all of your accounts to you. I've been rather hesitantly linking my steam/game/publisher accounts with twitch for in game loot, but I really hate doing it.

What if they decide to ban me for some reason? Do I get banned from all of them?

Centralization is only good for the center, not the constituents.

> This has been one of the most infuriating things about the internet maturing or whatever it's doing. All the big players trying centralize and tie all of your accounts to you. I've been rather hesitantly linking my steam/game/publisher accounts with twitch for in game loot, but I really hate doing it.

They bought you for in-game loot. Time to check your own personal definition of "hate".

I'm being mean because I feel that for those of us who "hate" something, we need to act on that feeling and accept the consequences. This seems the only way to change (yes, I know it's mostly insignificant in the face of the millions of counter-cases). If you give in the craving, there's no chance at all. You gotta be in it to win it.

You're not wrong. But in one very recent case for "watching" a streamer for 4 hours I got early access to a fairly fun and polished game (Overwatch 2).

I didn't have to pay USD for it, and now I have what is essentially a whole online pvp game to play with new stuff. Since I'm not one of the privileged few streamers that were just given access, that was the price to get into a game that one of the only friends whose gaming tastes overlap with mine.

I just wish there was more trustbusting going on. Letting large companies gobble up all the smaller ones is only good for the shareholders. Not the customers, not the employees, and definitely not taxpayers.

I'm sad I missed OpenID. Would've been fun to be able to set up my own identity provider for a while until websites would eventually stop supporting it.

I didn't miss the OpenID days. Basically everyone was a OpenID provider (i.e. all of them offered to handle your accounts for you), but no one was an OpenID consumer. Even at its heyday, I don't remember any single service where I could login with my OpenID except for the websites I made.

StackOverflow was one such service (or still is? not sure...).

StackOverflow deprecated OpenID years ago.

We let them own it. But we don't have to let them keep it forever. It was always a choice, but we didn't place enough importance on it, so we chose badly. Now that we understand how important it is we need to redecide, and own identity ourselves.

I don't know about "failed"... if you use a different identity for each different site it seems that your identity is pretty decentralised.

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