On his podcast on decentralized social media, @mike rheotically asks:

What if the web wasn't just links between web pages, but it also had links to people? Good question!

This was fundamentally why I created LID -- Light-Weight-Identity -- a protocol for user-centric digital identity almost 20 years ago! (2004).

It's lost to tech history, but perhaps these days it's time to dig it back out, as so many other good ideas from back then suddenly become viable.