I started a long list of issues that weren't even being considered a couple of years ago. I think it was posted to the W3C website. Best I can tell this list vanished. Probably embarrassed somebody that we considered identity and privacy to be social communications issues, but they are. Recently there's been a flurry of activity related to private media and account migration. We've had to fix these things outside the "system" because the system is only concerned with passing messages back and forth.

We're trying to solve privacy and permission and centralisation problems and how do you keep your online identity when the server you're on vanishes without a trace. And we've actually been successful in solving these problems. When I mentioned this recently on the gitforum it was like "right. But *we* didn't invent it, and until *we* invent it, it doesn't exist." And so they start brainstorming about cross-domain auth. Yeah, we tried the iframe thing in 2010. For a number of reasons that was a total failure. We tried several other things before finally settling on cross-domain identity provenance; which actually works. The mobility thing needs to separate who you are from what server you're on. We've even been able to make this work with webfinger. But if your whole idea of identity is user@host, you're going to have serious issues with mobility that can't ever be solved to anybody's satisfaction because as soon as you permanently attach @host to an identity it can't easily refer to you when you post from a different host.

As somebody else pointed out recently, there are a lot of people talking and trying to be in charge, but nobody is listening. They seem to insist that everybody re-invent each wheel. There are hundreds of wheels involved in this process and you're going to spend a long time re-learning the mistakes we already learned from and moved past.

Find out what is going on out here in the real world and in the trenches where we've been working on (and solving) these really hard problems for years now. Every 6-12 months the whole process falls apart and then we start from the beginning again trying to define what a message is and how to get it from point a to point b. That isn't even a real problem. Bloody ship it to port 25.