Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

> 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, is one of the core pillars of a free web, which is exactly what Mozilla claims to stand for.

I believe in a free web and I'm also willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'm ready to pledge not just my money but my time. I am willing to volunteer my skills as a developer, UX designer and my experience leading FOSS projects to Persona, or a Persona-like project that has a chance of succeeding. If you are involved in this, feel free to email me (see my profile for a point of contact).

I invite others willing to do the same to say so here.

I too, am in the camp that would like to see open alternatives to the proprietary SSO function. To me this is much more than just a technology problem, however. It's a two sided market creation problem.

Email providers don't have significant incentive to become Identity Providers; Web site owners do not have significant incentive to accept persona at least until many users adopt/request it; Users are mostly unaware of Persona's existence and the argument in favor for many is rather weak as the people who seem to care about privacy seem to be in an exclusive club.

There are a few keys to success that I can think of off the top of my head:

1. Solid awareness campaign to explain benefits to non-HN type users. Would depend on solid benefits of security, convenience/simplicity, and privacy.

2. Fantastic "default" identity provider as most email providers will not, in the short term, become Identity Providers. This has to work without sacrificing UX, security, convenience/simplicity, and privacy.

3. Adoption by at least 1 major email provider (e.g. FastMail).

While I don't bring much in the way of development skills (not my strength at all), I would be very willing to help on the strategy, partnerships / business development, marketing etc. front.

Did I ever get back to you on that with the update?

For people not in the loop: I would also like to pledge my time in developing a Persona or Persona alternative. I'm just a bit apprehensive on such a project's chances if it weren't backed by a big company like Mozilla. Then again, maybe we should just go for it.

You did not :) Have you talked to Dan Callahan yet?

I very much agree. A while ago I spent some time making an extension for MediaWiki for Persona, in hopes of maybe bringing Persona to Wikipedia at some point, but after Mozilla abandoned it we sort of lost hope on that front.

I am! Federated authentication would be a beautiful thing. I'll lend my dev/sysadmin experience to a project like this.

They may not be directly comparable with Persona, but such things are widely deployed in academic/research communities: https://shibboleth.net/ (web-specific), https://www.eduroam.org/ (roaming wifi-specific in practice?), and "e-science certificates" in the UK (specifically horrible -- definitely not a beautiful thing) which I think come under https://www.igtf.net/.

The recent generalized effort is Moonshot/ABFAB (https://jisc.ac.uk/assent), which I think has made disappointingly slow progress.

I was also sorry to see Mozilla give up on Persona - I believe the web needs something like this.

I happen to be quite good with Node / JavaScript and I will happily help out.

Same here, though Node is not my forte yet.

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

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