Comment by anderslemke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anderslemke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm a bit divided on whether or not the "centralized" thing is actually a problem Promise should tackle.

On one hand, I want to tell you that Promise is only centralized by default. Which is good for people that doesn't understand what a OpenID/IndieAuth Provider is. But as Promise is open source and the protocol caters for it, it is possible to have Promise redirect authentication requests to your own instance. Which then redirects you back to the relying party you want to sign in to. So it is possible to decentralize if that is what you want

On the other hand, I'm not sure it's a good idea to do it. Centralizing gives a lot of benefits. User experienc being one, but also being able to roll out eg. security updates quickly. But sure, centralization also creates problems.

But until now, I have a feeling that the problems with centralization, can be solved by other measures than going decentralized. Eg. being a non-profit organisation owned by the relying parties. This would guard against a lot of the problems with being centralized.

And I'm still to encounter a decentralized solution with a reasonable user experience for most people. OpenID, IndieAuth, SQRL, re:claimID, I'm looking at you. Sorry.

You're right that the user experience is a huge blocker, but I think that's something we as authors of tools can improve on. For example, there's a Wordpress plugin that lets your Wordpress site act as an IndieAuth identity[1]. That makes it pretty usable from and end-user perspective.

The challenge with centralized is that it is a single point of failure. The original post was more focused on "If you get locked out of google, you get locked out of everything". In that vein if promise gets hacked/bought/abandoned/changes it's business model etc.. then you lose all your accounts. The anonymous nature of it is great, but this is something Apple already offers with their sign-in with apple which is already widely supported and with the proxy-email solution you can still be contacted by the sites you're signing up with.

I got interested in IndieAuth because of a project of mine[2], trying to make it really easy for everyone to self-host their facebook/twitter equivalent with direct control over who has access. This runs into the problem with wide adoption where you have a separate credential for each of your friends' blogs. With IndieAuth built into the self-hosted platform, then your own self-hosted site becomes the one credential you can use on all your friends' sites. Self-hosted distributed identity for privacy AND ease-of-use.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/indieauth/ [2] You can find the link in other comments I've made on HN

I'm really happy that you're willing to take this discussion with me.

I totally understand what makes IndieAuth is a good solution. And it seems really easy. For me. But I have no idea how I would go about explaining it to, let's say, my mom.

Apple is offering something very similar to what Promise does. The difference is that Apple is a commercial corporation. Which means they're in the game to make money. Promise will be in the game to make authentication easy, secure and private.

In many ways I compare the goal of Promise, with the goal of DNS. Take a commodity and make it available globally in a reliable way. Yes, it will be a single point of failure. So the job of Promise will in large be, to keep the platform secure and reliable.

The mom-test is a good one, I'll have to think more about it. The truth is the advantages and disadvantages of various authentication systems are subtle, and hard for a lot of technical people to understand, much less care about.

Apple is a commercial corporation, and one of the biggest (by market cap) companies in the world. That gives me confidence that they'll be around for a long time, have sufficient resources to invest in security and reliability, and they have a well-established reputation for a focus on security. They do other things I don't like[1], but I think this is one area where they're setting really good precedent.

In addition, it's going to be difficult getting any sites (outside of maybe the crypto/grey-market) to adopt an auth system that doesn't let them contact their users. This is also I think a big failing of IndieAuth.

[1]:https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

Promise is basically challenging the assumption that authentication has anything to do with both personal identity and being able to contact a user.

If a site needs to contact the user, it's reasonable to ask for eg. an email. But now the intent of asking for an email has to be crystal clear, which makes you and them more aware of what data you are actually giving them.

Apple sure is doing some good stuff with their authentication solution and their efforts to help people with healthier passwords habits. I'm still not too fond of having such fundamental infrastructure owned by a private company. Would you be comfortable handing over DNS to Apple?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com