In the physical work, we have identities in various places granted by some authorities. In a country, you have a passport. In a company, you have an ID card. All of these have some characteristics that let others identify you and let you verify yourself.

In the digital world too, we have many identities granted by various platforms like Google, Meta, X, Instagram, etc. The web is amazing, because now we have a platform where you can learn about people, places, things, etc in the entire world. But there are a few challenges. One is the identity and relationships are distributed across platforms. The information and relationships are partly owned by the platforms, not portable and a bit opaque. This information is used to influence you and your identity. There is also the problem of spam. Then there are the algorithms that have conflicting goals. It makes it hard to have a relationship with the real world and understand it.

This is what uuid is trying to solve. By acting as an aggregator of your identities, it will make your information and your relationships portable, so you can take it to another platform of your choosing. For instance, if you want to take your X, Instagram, Substack followers to another platform, you can or if you want to sign up for a new service and provide them the metadata about your interests (hobbies, music, books, movies, etc) and take your connections, followers with you, you can do that. It is not to enable anyone to spam you, every new platform will still have consent systems of their own, but if you are connected with someone on LinkedIn, you can stay connected with them on a new platform as well if they consent to it via a global setting on uuid. Or if you follow someone on X and want to automatically follow them on a new service, Z, this will allow you to do that. So, you are not stuck on the LinkedIn, X, Instagram network and can move to a different network without losing your connections or your preferences. It removes the barrier to move across networks, increases optionality for you and reduces the leverage that large networks have over you

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