Self-sovereign human digital identities are ideal for decentralization and scalability since they unlock the potential for billions of nodes with harmonious power. Using these identities for consensus would promote the Tangle to be several orders of magnitude more decentralized than existing PoW and PoS networks. To facilitate these identities, we need a better social network that has a mechanism to vote on whether another user is a unique human being using their publicly shared information.
Human identities should be the focus of digital identities since they establish maximum sybil attack prevention. All other things in this world (creatures, organizations, electronics, etc.) are owned by humans and can be linked back to a human or group of humans. HumanityDAO is a good step in the right direction since it relies on users to verify each other. However, it relies on Twitter and has an insufficient funding model. Twitter also has its share of flaws such as centralization, a lack of privacy, the inability to dislike things, and the absence of other features. Other social networks such as Steem, Diaspora, Minds, and Mastodon are interesting alternatives but have their flaws as well, and digital identities are generally not their priority.
A good social network for digital identities should cater to all people: old and young, reserved and outgoing, those with vastly different interests, and hopefully even those with limited internet access. Ideally, it would be encompassing enough for a fair global basic income. The network would need to ensure that each identified human is unique and alive without forcing them to give up too much private information. This is nontrivial, and feedback is welcome. I believe that identities based on location, spending habits, facial recognition, and biometrics are insufficient because they are not private enough for most users, are hard to verify via quorum, and are fairly easily gameable by artificial intelligence. A better way to identify humans is by their net positive activity contributed, i.e., proof of human beneficial creative work. Creativity is possibly the last frontier that artificial intelligence will master, and unique work of all sorts can be published in a minimally privacy-invasive way.
Relevant research:
The First Step Towards a Unified Identity Protocol
Anti-sybil attack mechanisms
DLT and Identity
HumanityDAO