DIDs are the new NFTs: crypto enthusiasts desperately trying to find an excuse for why their blockchains are needed in the wider world.

The name "Decentralized Identifiers" tells you everything you need to know. It's just blockchain. DID backends include ION/Sidetree, Indy, and Ethr using BitCoin, Hyperledger, and Ethereum respectively.

It would be interesting if it would be possible to 'chain' or 'web' presences from one platform to another. For examle, your X profile could contain a string like "bsky:something fedi:someone@something.social", to create a one-direction link from platform to platform. Unfortunately, that linkage can be tenuous: Post-acquisition, there were rumors that folks on X were getting penalized for pointing people to other platforms.

One of the benefits of a DID-like is that it can be parsed. Lots of folks have probably seen the DOI, a pointer to a specific publication. Here are two that folks might not know:

• The ORCID (https://info.orcid.org/researchers/), a unique ID for researchers, and a place for researchers to provide information about themselves, their affiliated institutions, and their publications.

• The RRID (https://rrid.site), a unique ID for research materials & tools. You can identify a specific antibody, or a specific DNA sequencer, or a particular HPC platform.

These are all centralized repositories of things (researchers, plasmids, instruments, …), all with the purpose of making it easier to identify, find, and connect things.

Isn’t the whole point of DIDs that you can switch platforms without your DID changing?