You're correct, and I think this is part of the growing disgruntling about PGP.
The most successful deployment, Debian, is a closed system: while Debian developers' keys and signatures are on the standard public keyservers, for Debian membership and archive authentication purposes, only signatures from existing Debian members count, and only keys explicitly pushed to Debian servers are usable. So it is possible for Debian to demand a specific meaning for signatures (which, possibly surprisingly, is "I have verified that the government associates this name with the holder of this private key": https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/06/msg00787.html), and it can hope that its members use a compatible definition when signing other members' or prospective members' keys. But Debian does not read trustworthiness, either to sign other keys or to generally be a good person, in PGP signatures. That's set by being / becoming a member of the project, which is no one's individual decision.
Leaving aside trust, keysigning parties have increasingly been sounding to me like an invitation to show up with fake ID and find some people who've never met you before. Possibly while everyone is drinking. They're also sort of a weird habit for a privacy-loving crowd, since they involve publishing non-deniable records of who met who, but hey.
To be fair, none of this means that the PGP protocol is bad, or even the GnuPG software is bad (although GnuPG sometimes seems like it wants to make the web of trust even murkier than it is). It just means that the public web of trust is useless, and you either need direct key exchange with those with whom you want to communicate, or some sort of organization that you trust to verify keys for the purpose at hand. For instance, if you're doing email within a company for company purposes, letting the company track keys is probably totally fine.
Huh, I didn't know about the Debian rules. But Debian keys and signatures are published to public keyservers too, aren't they? So your trust paths that contain a Debian developer may not guarantee the trustworthiness of the endpoint.
I thought that bootstrapping my trust from one of the Debian developers would make sense, since I already have Debian installed (somewhere you have to start). Looks like it's not that a good idea.
Yeah, a trust path that is end-to-end all Debian developers is fine. And I sometimes know that a certain human (that I don't have a way to meet with in person) is a reasonable human being, so I'll trust a path to that human that consists of Debian people, or other people I personally know to be reasonable human beings.
The most successful deployment, Debian, is a closed system: while Debian developers' keys and signatures are on the standard public keyservers, for Debian membership and archive authentication purposes, only signatures from existing Debian members count, and only keys explicitly pushed to Debian servers are usable. So it is possible for Debian to demand a specific meaning for signatures (which, possibly surprisingly, is "I have verified that the government associates this name with the holder of this private key": https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/06/msg00787.html), and it can hope that its members use a compatible definition when signing other members' or prospective members' keys. But Debian does not read trustworthiness, either to sign other keys or to generally be a good person, in PGP signatures. That's set by being / becoming a member of the project, which is no one's individual decision.
Leaving aside trust, keysigning parties have increasingly been sounding to me like an invitation to show up with fake ID and find some people who've never met you before. Possibly while everyone is drinking. They're also sort of a weird habit for a privacy-loving crowd, since they involve publishing non-deniable records of who met who, but hey.
To be fair, none of this means that the PGP protocol is bad, or even the GnuPG software is bad (although GnuPG sometimes seems like it wants to make the web of trust even murkier than it is). It just means that the public web of trust is useless, and you either need direct key exchange with those with whom you want to communicate, or some sort of organization that you trust to verify keys for the purpose at hand. For instance, if you're doing email within a company for company purposes, letting the company track keys is probably totally fine.