@argumatronic One way to publish a canonical, authoritative identity database without centralization would be:

[Pause for breath]

A blockchain-distributed, Webfinger-accessible public key database.

Like Keybase, but more buzzwordy.

@argumatronic The other major federated services where personal identity is important are e-mail and IRC.

E-mail identity management consists of sending your new address to all your contacts and hoping they change it in their address book. I'm in the process of moving my e-mail out of the U.S. and I can tell you it takes several reminders to get it done.

IRC solves this problem by centralizing identity verification with NickServ. This only works because IRC has a single namespace for nicks.

Follow-up: any strategy to encourage increased federation is dead-in-the-water without a good story for identity portability.

At minimum that means: an automated way to move follows and followers to another address.

Ideally, there would be a way the migrate content too, but microblogging is pretty forgetful so I don't think this is a requirement.