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Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

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221–230 of 243 posts

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#221

> I don’t know if something like a Kickstarter campaign to raise some money to pay for engineer time would help sway Mozilla at all, but I’m perfectly happy pledging a few hundred dollars and running the campaign, if necessary. I just really want to see Persona succeed. I mentioned this by email, but I'll repeat it here: I believe in the design behind Persona. I believe a well structured, free authentication provider…

FIDO protocol support would be nice to have too by default.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, I didn't even know it was an option until it stopped being an option. Not to take away from your overall point, but you can still very much use persona: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona (linked from https://login.persona.org/ )

Cool. I'll give it a shot. There is a Drupal module for it (I run Drupal on my current primary site, for now), though it only has 38 active installs, which is somewhat worrying.

There is an Apache module too: https://github.com/mozilla/mod_authnz_persona

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#223
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, I didn't even know it was an option until it stopped being an option. Not to take away from your overall point, but you can still very much use persona: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona (linked from https://login.persona.org/ )

> Defintely something to note for future UX designs... but Persona, the service hosted by mozilla, is being decommissioned in late 2016. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.identity...

> In the event that Persona is decommissioned, we will provide at least 9 months of notice, so there are no actions that need to be taken right now. Persona continues to be monitored and supported, though there is still no new feature development.

I'm part of the team that runs the production service of Persona, and I can confirm it is operated, monitored and managed like any other critical production service today.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note: usernames should just be emails these days, they're unique and save all the effort of needing another made up name.

Theoretically yes, but it's not as simple as that. Every identity can have more than one email associated with it, and emails can change over time. So "username == email" is fine as long as the concept of a username mutating is fine.

These are not unique to email addresses as identifiers, because people change over time. You can't even count on people's real names staying the same over time, as something as simple as marriage gives many an impetus to change it. Any database that assumes immutability of one's visible identity is broken by design.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically yes, but it's not as simple as that. Every identity can have more than one email associated with it, and emails can change over time. So "username == email" is fine as long as the concept of a username mutating is fine.

I don't see a problem, it just means you can login with multiple emails then. They're still unique to you. LinkedIn and Facebook and other services already do this. A username/real name can still be used as the "name" if this is an online community or something similar.

Many email addresses are dumb forwards without the eventual receiver (the "identified") even having an account directly related to the domain where the forwarding is done. Would those be usable for persona or only the "backend" address with an actual user login that collects forwarded emails and is ideally never given to a third party?

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#226
post #97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're still unique to you. Nope. Most free email providers out there (including gmail) have policies for username expiration, some even quite aggressively (like one month without login). "Me" on one of these services might not be "me" in three months' time, but you-website won't know that and will happily send a password reset link to my old email.

Also, people share email addresses. Really, they do.

That thought makes me feel dirty.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#227
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defintely something to note for future UX designs... but Persona, the service hosted by mozilla, is being decommissioned in late 2016. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.identity...

> In the event that Persona is decommissioned, we will provide at least 9 months of notice, so there are no actions that need to be taken right now. Persona continues to be monitored and supported, though there is still no new feature development. I'm part of the team that runs the production service of Persona, and I can confirm it is operated, monitored and managed like any other critical production service today.

I’m sorry, wasn’t my intention to spread FUD.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#228
post #82

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I maintain django-browserid (and StravosK is a valued contributor many sites. This is all just my own personal opinion. I was very bullish on Persona early on, but the fact of the matter is, we failed . And not just because (as I feel is being implied) some higher up suddenly came over and asked for an unreasonable amount of adoption for a revolutionary product. We failed for a thousan…

Frankly, the name was the worst of it It took some effort to kill the UI-theming Persona with fire (and there were very good reasons to do so); anything that even hinted at the possibility that you'd have to resurrect that in order to do something that looked useful wasn't going to fly unless there was a lot of forgetting time in between uses. Yer average user doesn't monitor tech news sites in order to determine whether or not a product of the same name from the same outfit is really something completely different.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#229
post #82

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I maintain django-browserid (and StravosK is a valued contributor many sites. This is all just my own personal opinion. I was very bullish on Persona early on, but the fact of the matter is, we failed . And not just because (as I feel is being implied) some higher up suddenly came over and asked for an unreasonable amount of adoption for a revolutionary product. We failed for a thousan…

All these points don't seem unsolvable problems to me. The only failure was to abandon the project before it had it's chance out in the world.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#230
post #133
post #63

The main problem with Persona was not the tech, Persona is great and works well. The problem is that building federated identity services is hard. Persona is not a centralized login system such as "login with Facebook". With Persona, once you decide to login with your email account, first Persona looks for an IdP with your domain/provider, the if not found it goes back to the persona catchall service. For a while gma…

> What killed Persona was not tech but the lack of traction. Developers loved it but failed to use it. The idea was always that Mozilla would ship native integration in Firefox. There were very very pretty mockups going around and everyone was holding their breath for that to happen.[1] Even announcing they would ship it in the next version would mean 1) it’s stable now and 2) Mozilla is behind it. My guess is Google…

I agree. Some people in this thread are saying Persona is not dead because it's still up... but without the browser integration (which never was arrived), it's not even half as good as what it could be, and without Mozilla endorsement, it's not going to get serious adoption.
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