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Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

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Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#21

Post by dickhardt »

jrockway wrote: post #17
danpalmer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, registering and configuring your app at Apple / Facebook / Google etc. is non-trivial. I know what I am doing in theory, and I have already invested a week of time in configuration and approvals and updates. I don't feel like it's worth giving up control over your user's authentication to an intermediary in return for saving a week of work. Maybe the case could be made for day-1 of a startup, but cert…

> I don't feel like it's worth giving up control over your user's authentication to an intermediary in return for saving a week of work. The market is tested, though. Auth0 is a notable player in this space and they seem to be making money. Like you, I've been pretty unhappy with this class of product. Auth0 provides just enough to be dangerous; upload Javascript with no way to unit test it to gate auth (that broke!)…

Auth0 can be prohibitively expensive if you have low revenue per user.

We are working on providing an OSS docker image that would mock Hellō so that you could get full coverage in automated testing of registration and login. Would you find that useful?

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#23

Post by jrockway »

dickhardt wrote: post #21
jrockway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel like it's worth giving up control over your user's authentication to an intermediary in return for saving a week of work. The market is tested, though. Auth0 is a notable player in this space and they seem to be making money. Like you, I've been pretty unhappy with this class of product. Auth0 provides just enough to be dangerous; upload Javascript with no way to unit test it to gate auth (that broke!)…

Auth0 can be prohibitively expensive if you have low revenue per user. We are working on providing an OSS docker image that would mock Hellō so that you could get full coverage in automated testing of registration and login. Would you find that useful?

Absolutely, that sounds really neat. (We actually don't do a SaaS at work anymore, so I'm not in the market... but would have loved that at the time!)

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#24

Post by dickhardt »

rideontime wrote: post #19

I created my account with Google. But then Google shut my account down for posting too much pirated music to Youtube. How do I get back into my Greenfield Fitness account?

Giving you control of your identity is our mission. You online presence should not be held hostage by any of the social providers, which is why we encourage you to add backup providers so you can recover your Hellō Wallet if you lose access to your preferred provider.

Losing access to your users is also a risk as a developer as the provider can take away your app access to their service. Our goal is to be neutral and not be able to take away either the user's account, or the developer's access.

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#26

Post by [deleted] »

dickhardt wrote: post #11
derekzhouzhen wrote: post #9

This looks like a wrapper around several popular social login. While it is convenient, I fail to see how it is decentralized. If anything, it just add another single point of failure, so it is more centralized? As a SaaS vendor, I likely already support several social logins and email verification. Why should I switch? If I have not implemented the social logins, I can see the convenient factor. However, social login…

Thanks for the questions! Hellō is not decentralized -- apologies for any confusion -- did I mistakenly write that somewhere? The governance is decentralized. Yes, it is another point of failure, as is any other service you build your app on. I have extensive experience with tier zero services such as AWS IAM and have applied those learnings to the Hellō deployment if that is any consolation. The value proposition of…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#27

Post by ascorbic »

dickhardt wrote: post #2

Hi HN! I’m Dick Hardt[1]. Over the last twenty years, I’ve led the design of identity standards (OAuth 2.0, JWT) and systems that you and billions of others use every day.[2] You know that these systems don’t always work in your favor. Each is bespoke and most, if not all, of your identity is locked up in these silos. I called this out in my Identity 2.0 OSCON talk in 2005 where I popularized a user-centric identity…

Can you support GitHub as aprovider? It seems to be the de-facto standard for dev tool services, and is the only one I regularly use.

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#28

Post by dickhardt »

Ennea wrote: post #25

I just have one question: with a name like Hello, how do you ever expect anybody to find your service on the Internet?

You are correct -- a generic word like 'hello' is challenging. Today people find https://hello.coop through Google currently by searching for "hello coop" or "hello identity"

Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity

#30

Post by dickhardt »

ascorbic wrote: post #27
dickhardt wrote: post #2

Hi HN! I’m Dick Hardt[1]. Over the last twenty years, I’ve led the design of identity standards (OAuth 2.0, JWT) and systems that you and billions of others use every day.[2] You know that these systems don’t always work in your favor. Each is bespoke and most, if not all, of your identity is locked up in these silos. I called this out in my Identity 2.0 OSCON talk in 2005 where I popularized a user-centric identity…

Can you support GitHub as aprovider? It seems to be the de-facto standard for dev tool services, and is the only one I regularly use.

Yes. GitHub, GitLab, and Discord are on our roadmap. Twitter is also -- but more as a way to claim a Twitter handle.

We did not do GitHub and Discord at first as they are OAuth only -- no OpenID Connect support.

Thanks for letting us know what you would like!

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