I guess here we have one of those decision points that may greatly influence the future of the fediverse. According to the bottom-up process any interested project initiatives can make the pragmatic choice that fits the needs of the participants at the time, with the risk getting stuck with that choice once there is an installed base. And protocol and tech debt when other initiatives add their own pragmatic variations or alternative technologies.
That is an argument to tackle the issue in top-down fashion and start at W3C SocialCG with a Digital Identity Taskforce or similar. CC @codenamedmitri @eprodrom
Maybe anno 2025 the ‘technology bet’ for the identity open standards most likely to gain broadest adoption can be made with confidence. It would require making a shortlist with options, elaborate pros and cons, and comparing them against a range of factors.
“Nomadic identity” ?
As a more general remark I would add that the words “nomadic identity” are not indicative of a feature of the fediverse, but rather represent a fix for the current implementation of the fediverse. The need for an identity to be ‘nomadic’ stems from the way that identities are tied to instances / domain names. The general case is making “identity” an intuitive concept on the fediverse i.e. “doing identity right”.