Comment by Natanael_L
7 years ago
I think that currently Keybase.io is the only thing trying to be universal, with their transparency log plus links to external profiles along with signed attestations for them.
But even that's still not quite what I'm looking for. There's no straightforward way to link arbitary protocol accounts / identities to it, outside of linking plain URL:s.
We need something a bit smarter than keybase that would actually allow you to maintain a single personal identifier across multiple protocols.
Also, as I looked a little bit into Keybase I learned that they don't support any protocols that don't have public profile-like pages. So a pure messenger wouldn't be supported by Keybase.
They're opening up the protocol so that any website can provide the authentication, and Mastodon already implements it: if you have an account on Mastodon, you can have an additional proof on keybase.
See the blog post and the spec that details the changes to implement: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-proofs-for-mastodon-and-ever...
I presume a pure IM system would have to implement some web gateway at the server level.