Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols.
Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.
Agree. What really frustrated me about Persona, was that the way they portrayed the project was that it was not yet ready for production adoption[1]. And then they cancel it because people weren't using it.
I know I played around with a proof of concept implementation internally, but never deployed it publicly, which was a decision based primarily on their own messaging.
[1] EG the JS implementation and the dependency on persona.org were both temporary stop-gaps to enable fast-prototyping and use in other browsers, but would be replaced with a "real" implementation in the browser that supported multiple providers before broad roll-out.
I used it for my company at the time as part of a dual-auth system (Facebook / Persona). We were even featured as an example on the Persona dev website. The service worked great, even for my technically-not-literate audience. And it was reliable (we sold event tickets).
I was all in on Persona for side projects, and would have started using it professionally... was extremely disappointed they gave up on it. It was excellent to use.
The thing that annoyed me most about Persona was that it wan't publicised very well. I only (re)joined the tech sector around 2013 but even though I've been personally using Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since the late 90s, I never heard about Persona until the announcement of its discontinuation in 2016.
IMO, the main mistake was that it used a centralized authentication system to "bootstrap" the protocol - basically a fallback auth source back when nobody supported the protocol. In theory, after the protocol was adopted widely, they could shut down the Mozilla Persona servers. In practice, it ended up being perceived as "Mozilla Login" and the branding (dropping BrowserID) didn't help.
It didn't have to be this way, although I understand the reasons for it. The fallback auth system could have simply been a piece of software infrastructure that you (the site operator) were expected to run locally. It would have had two downsides: 1) it's a fairly complex piece of software that sends email and interacts with the website, so it would have been hard to make portable, and 2) it would mean doing the email auth dance separately on each site (like we do already).
The main advantage, though, would have been that it wouldn't depend on Mozilla running servers. The project could live on.
Honestly, if I had free time, this is one of the things I would be working on. The protocols are already written up, it just needs software.
Portier "considers itself a spiritual successor to Mozilla Persona" and is also sponsored by Mozilla (or at least the claim appears to be made on the bottom of the web site).
Comments
Persona stands out here as a huge opportunity lost. It offered a future with a fully decentralized, federated authentication scheme, based on open protocols.
Yes, they made some mistakes and adoption was poor. But it worked well and the underlying protocols are something the internet still desperately needs.
Agree. What really frustrated me about Persona, was that the way they portrayed the project was that it was not yet ready for production adoption[1]. And then they cancel it because people weren't using it.
I know I played around with a proof of concept implementation internally, but never deployed it publicly, which was a decision based primarily on their own messaging.
[1] EG the JS implementation and the dependency on persona.org were both temporary stop-gaps to enable fast-prototyping and use in other browsers, but would be replaced with a "real" implementation in the browser that supported multiple providers before broad roll-out.
I used it for my company at the time as part of a dual-auth system (Facebook / Persona). We were even featured as an example on the Persona dev website. The service worked great, even for my technically-not-literate audience. And it was reliable (we sold event tickets).
I dabbled in Persona for personal things.
It was DELIGHTFUL, and while I understand the rationales for why it was canned, I still harbor some sour grapes.
I was all in on Persona for side projects, and would have started using it professionally... was extremely disappointed they gave up on it. It was excellent to use.
The thing that annoyed me most about Persona was that it wan't publicised very well. I only (re)joined the tech sector around 2013 but even though I've been personally using Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since the late 90s, I never heard about Persona until the announcement of its discontinuation in 2016.
Why is it not continued as a community project?
This is related to how it was built.
IMO, the main mistake was that it used a centralized authentication system to "bootstrap" the protocol - basically a fallback auth source back when nobody supported the protocol. In theory, after the protocol was adopted widely, they could shut down the Mozilla Persona servers. In practice, it ended up being perceived as "Mozilla Login" and the branding (dropping BrowserID) didn't help.
It didn't have to be this way, although I understand the reasons for it. The fallback auth system could have simply been a piece of software infrastructure that you (the site operator) were expected to run locally. It would have had two downsides: 1) it's a fairly complex piece of software that sends email and interacts with the website, so it would have been hard to make portable, and 2) it would mean doing the email auth dance separately on each site (like we do already).
The main advantage, though, would have been that it wouldn't depend on Mozilla running servers. The project could live on.
Honestly, if I had free time, this is one of the things I would be working on. The protocols are already written up, it just needs software.
Portier "considers itself a spiritual successor to Mozilla Persona" and is also sponsored by Mozilla (or at least the claim appears to be made on the bottom of the web site).
https://portier.github.io/