I think this may be related to how it has proven difficult to be able to maintain a persistent, decentralized identity online. The centralized "make an account

I think this may be related to how it has proven difficult to be able to maintain a persistent, decentralized identity online. The centralized "make an account with us" approach lends itself towards monopoly centralization of every service - once a critical mass is on-board with a single service, they get led into path dependency with the others. That's how Google, Facebook, et al. have been able to creep into every aspect of identity. The only protocol I can think of that has bucked this trend is IRC, which has moved from a "few big networks" model to a bevy of smaller ones since the mid-2000s. Identity persistence there is secondary to community persistence, which may account for the difference. All the centralized services rely on being acommunal - a single giant network on which anyone may reach anyone. And with acommunal spaces, there is a strong "free for all" aspect that puts trade and monetization in the dominant position - which, besides the monopolistic aspects, leads to spam, identity theft, sockpuppeting, et al. There is, perhaps, a model for reversing the overall trend through the community-persistence method; an entire community is harder to fake, thus it produces much stronger guarantees about identity.