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I had the same idea about a decade ago but never bothered to try to implement it. I felt like it would have suffered from the same problem all other technologies have in security: overly complex user interactions. The concept makes sense, but getting N other people to commit is overhead the average user probably doesn't want to deal with.

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So I preferred the idea of regular folks for backup, for security reasons. I thought of the idea of professional users like say your bank or 3rd party. The issue is that it's far easier for the govt to subpoena those pro 3rd parties and recover your key. Whereas, they would have to know which of your friends you used for key recovery to be able to do that. The idea was to make it tough for a bad/powerful actor to steal your key. Of course, the challenge is that a non social person would need friends or to depend on ISPs, banks (pro 3rd party providers). My goal besides security when building this project was to break the chain of 3rd party auths (Google, MS, Github, etc) :-(. They use their auth as a way to lock folks into their ecosystem and if you offend them in anyway, you could lose access to everything. Offend Google on adsense and lose your personal photos/email. Offend Amazon on sales and lose your prime streaming/AWS access. Hopefully as the idea picks up, the monopolistic corps can be tackled again to remove such power.

I wholeheartedly agree with where you were aiming your goals. Other thoughts I've had:

- What if access is time critical but your backup people are distributed across timezones? Or they aren't available for some reason? Could be hours to days before you could recover your account

- Adding/removing people as they enter/exit your life could make it a challenge to maintain (PGP + trust vibes)

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