I'm not going to pretend I grasp the technological details of either Weird or the Leaf protocol, but the basic concept of superpowering the personal website as identity provider is very attractive — and the passion of your writing is infectious 🙂 I hope to someday reach a lightbulb moment with your work and just implement it on my own site.

Are the people who invented this aware of NOSTR?
If so, what makes this different? And if not, perhaps we could use NOSTR to bridge the gap in the fediverse at the moment between NOSTR users and Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy/KBIN/MBIN users

I started forking Lemmy for an inventory system but then realized that NOSTR was far more suited to that and other applications that require security and encryption.

https://nostr.org

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it's also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that's the intention.

That's a load-bearing "could" if I've ever seen one.

I don't really see the point of these new authentication methods. OpenID had federated authentication years ago that was actually used by a bunch of sites like stackoverflow. Native browser support is nice (as long as browser addons can be used to manage credentials) but I don't really see that big an advantage to good ol' OpenID.

OpenID died in the federated space because developers couldn't be bothered to trust anyone but Google, Facebook, and Twitter, so I'm not sure why things would change now, unless the big auth providers shut down their OAuth APIs in favour of fedcm.