I have a question to all the hackers here about personal identity managers and UX. There are projects to decentralize personal identity and move away from passwords, such as Solid (https://solid.mit.edu) and our own project, Qbix (https://qbix.com/platform).

The WeChat article recently posted shows one major thing about user behavior and UX architecture. Users actually prefer to have one APP on their phone representing their social identity, have all their notifications, contacts, etc. from all different communities in the app.

So this probably means that the "personal identity server" should have some default protocol to receive notifications (encrypted with user's public key) and an APP for iOS and Android. The server would have rules for processing notifications and may notify the user (eg it may stop after the first 5 or set do not disturb where only the badge updates). Upon opening the app the user would see all the notifications from all the other services (they would be fetched and decrypted). And those notifications may contain deep-links back into flows that generated the notifications, eg a chat.

What is also nice is if you can have these rules be general purpose hooks that run on the client in some isolated JS environment. Then for example you can update the list of ids that a user's contacts have on different services (if you have pairwise anonymity) in the background. And next time you visit a website the auth extension/library/app can offer to connect you with those people on that website.

I think the Personal App should
display badges corresponding to the # of websites that have caused notifications, not the # of notifications. The latter should appear only when you open the app and see the list of relying party websites.
Then each website can have a # of notifications next to it and the can be sorted eg by most recent or most urgent notifications.

Last thing - by having a personal APP I have a feeling that it would also be tied in with payments in the future. Identity service is becoming tied with payments (to prevent fraud, China now ties the two together more than any other country and cash is disappearing). So the Personal App could in the future have some standard for attaching payment methods and using them without giving the relying party anything except tokens representing payment plans the user agreed to (like Stripe does).

In this way, even though payments are increasingly tied to identity - which may lead to fascism - we can empower local communities to control the identity and maybe in the future even issue their own money on their own credit! This may help finance loans for poor people in India etc. (already shown that having a large group guarantee loans works better for everyone due to social factors etc.) and pull people out of poverty faster. @mediaprophet what do you think of these points about integrating payments inside identity App in the future?

(By the way I say community because you may host your own data AND your own identity on your own server but when it comes to reputation and payments, there has to be some others who give you this value. Maybe it will not be communities. Maybe it will be completely distributed with no centers. But so far in history, wealth and reputation and power has always found a way to concentrate itself at least a little.)