[tialaramex]

For the vast majority of services, there's no value or even negative value in binding my "identity" to some sort of government ID.

You accept Google and Apple might deny you access but then you just blithely assume the US Federal Government (for example) would never do so, which shouldn't pass the laugh test.

I can imagine it being valuable if my government wants to help get me back in to, say, my bank accounts if I somehow lost all my credentials (e.g. my home burned down suddenly but I somehow escaped with nothing). But I don't feel like my GitHub, Gmail, Patreon, etc. make sense in this context. If my friends can lose a phone every year or two and make a new god-damn account, I think "My home burned down and I have nothing" is a good enough reason.

Gitlab's attitude of (for unpaid accounts): Too bad, just make another one - seems appropriate for almost everything. If tialaramex never wrote another HN comment, and instead tlrmx or tialaramex2 or whatever began posting, who would even care ?

[toomuchtodo]

HN participants, for whatever reason, approach these challenges as “but this isn’t a problem I have.” You’re the builder (broad strokes and wild assumption), but there are far more citizens (hundreds of millions at least) who are simply consumers of these systems. They are your grandparents, your parents, your siblings, your children. Passkeys are rolling out internet wide to all sorts of critical services people rely on, and they’ll need a solution if they lose their cryptographic identity assertion, because you can’t always just create a new account when you lose access (either because data, finance, or authority is tied to that account). Loss of gitlab access is inconsequential compared to losing access to your email, your bank account, etc.