I think that what we see with Nostr is a loose framework that could implement a purely digital identity with landlords and their properties, and clients, without requiring further information than the identity. You could rent with an anonymous identity then, and the more landlords you make happy the less risky it looks to the others. The veracity of the landlord's identity and ownership or right of enjoyment of the property has to be there for the landlord too.

The only hard problem in it, as I see it, is how to guarantee a consistent and correct copy of all of these documents is available. Part of that has to be in charging for access to it. This would stand in place of the IT/accounting systems in these short term rental services, keeping records that everyone can see. And yes, they don't have to leak any private information, except via your use of your digital identity elsewhere, and then a search can zip them all together.

So obviously this all brings the necessity for people to understand having multiple identities for different purposes, so that the sex shop and christian bookstore don't find out about you visiting the other.

While everyone whines about why it can't be done in theory, it will soon simply be done in practice!

I don't know how to put this, but you have history backwards. The US government explicitly banned commerce on the early internet (i.e. the '70s and '80s). In 1980, the first social media network was created: Usenet (see my essay for more details on the history of Usenet). Meaningful commerce didn't occur on the internet until the 90's when the general public got access to the internet.

In other words, because of state intervention, social media came before commerce on the internet.

Classsified don't matter much, tbh, it's the real time service networks: delivery, transportation, services/gigs i.e. fungible goods/services, which general objects being sold are not.

Last time I tried was about a year ago and got discouraged by the experience. Kept trying to pay to a merchant using OpenNode from my Breez Wallet but the transaction kept failing. No route or something like that.

So I didn't try to do anything with my wallet for a while. Next time I tried to do something, it was months later and I found out that Breez had closed my channel due to inactivity. Thankfully, my funds were still safe but I had to move them back on-chain, including paying miner fees. It felt bad because I had to pay something like 4,000 sats to set up my Breez wallet and now I'll have to pay it again if I want to set up a new channel. It also felt shitty because there wasn't any notification about closure due to inactivity. It is in the docs, but they don't tell you anywhere upfront when setting up.

Granted, this was about a year ago, so maybe things are better now? Between then and now I haven't used LN at all except to log in to SN

So yeah, this was my first experience trying to pay directly with LN and it was frustrating. And I consider myself fairly technically savvy, run my own node and everything. If this is the first experience of LN for a normie they're less likely to even want to try again, whereas I'm still willing to give it a shot since I believe in bitcoin.