ion VS ssi-service

- For completeness and good scientific practice, also look at solutions beyond Ethereum: https://identity.foundation/ion/

ION decentralized identity (an implementation of the SideTree protocol)

Other uses are extremely limited IMO. Microsoft ION, an implementation of decentralised identity w3c spec, for example. It makes a Bitcoin transaction containing a hash that refers to several identities. Since the identities are mutable there does not seem much value in remembering the hash at a point in time.

I agree the website is very bad, currently. Maybe this page has better resources:

https://essif-lab.github.io/framework/docs/ssi-standards

But there's quite a lot going on... the work on SSI is being coordinated by the W3C Working Group on VCs (Verifiable Credentials) and DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers).

https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/

https://www.w3.org/2019/did-wg/

I don't know of any real-world usage yet, despite the fact that the specifications required for things to work and be used by real people already exist, and that there's a lot of DID methods (over 80 last I checked) registered, but as people have noted, most are based on blockchain (but not all... there's stuff like the peer, git, jwk DID methods that do not require blockchain)... but I have to say that, in this particular instance, blockchains may actually be a proper solution for a real problem (that of looking up public keys and metadata for entities/users in a distributed, highly-reliable manner).

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/#did-methods

If you want to look for related stuff, look for things that users would need to have to use SSI, like DID wallets... Some random examples I found by quickly searching:

https://www.abtwallet.io/en/

https://www.didwallet.io/

https://igrant.io/

https://www.dock.io/dock-wallet-app

https://identity.foundation/ion/

The OpenID Connect Standard is being extended to support self-issued OIDC (SIOP) which allows OIDC to interact with SSI constructs:

https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...

So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff being created around SSI, but admitedly, almost nothing practical yet... Hence why I was hoping to find something where this work could be very helpful, like logging into Codeberg :)

I would also recommend checking ION¹. I have tested a few DID Methods including Sovrin, Veres One, and ION, and the latter is the most spec-adherent and well-implemented, apart from receiving funding from companies like Microsoft and TBD (which is proposing web5 in the first place). And yes, it is the only DID Method to receive support from big tech (was incubated within Microsoft, then donated to the Decentralized Identity Foundation), and it also happens to be a technically good solution.

¹ https://identity.foundation/ion/

Microsoft ION --->https://identity.foundation/ion/

Doing some more research: Looks like the idea is developed by tbd.website and uses a L2 tool called ION that utilizes the SideTree protocol. Interestingly, ION does not introduce a new token which I find interesting, and one of the things I've found confusing about Stacks.

to publish credentials anyone can discover and independently verify" without spending any thought on how such a PKI would be ("independently") governed without centralizing everything back again – an all too common failure model in 'web3' [3].

Meanwhile, both Dorsey's slideware [4] and the actual specifications referenced [5][6] make bad technological choices with regard to privacy where users have stable identifiers (their public keys) which must be published, allowing them to be easily tracked across transactions. While this can be considered a building block, no material on the PR website or the TBD54566975 Github repository (I guess it's some other wordplay) indicates that they even recognize this as a problem, let alone how to solve it.

This is no new problem however: Sovrin – which many people referenced in the OP have worked on or with – has published a commentary on this back in 2018 [7]. There's also a great talk by Drummond Reed if you need to refresh your memory about what you need to consider when designing identity systems [8].

Otherwise the OP can be a great introduction to identity, but please don't feed the magical hypetrain.

[1] https://github.com/TBD54566975/ssi-service#whats-supported

[2] https://developer.tbd.website/docs/Decentralized%20Web%20Pla...

[3] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[4] See the diagram on page X of [2]

[5] https://identity.foundation/decentralized-web-node/spec/#ser...

[6] https://identity.foundation/ion/

[7] https://sovrin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/What-Goes-On-T...

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzM_Brpk95E&t=1574s