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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

Persona is one of the Mozilla projects that best exemplifies why we need Mozilla. They're the only ones purely dedicated to the future of the open web. The only foreseeable future for the web today is one where two or three gatekeepers control user information with no way out. Persona seemed like the best way to prevent that future.

The services that they're switching their focus to are also crucial for the open web. Firefox needs them to be competitive, and the open web needs a competitive Firefox. But it feels like putting Persona on the backburner—especially when it comes to UI integration in the browser—is letting a pivotal moment pass us by, and I don't think identity on the open web will recover.

If you held a donation drive for Persona browser integration, the donations from Hacker News alone would fund it.

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Mozilla does a great job promoting open web standards and Firefox is the one of the best footholds the community and industry have against hegemony and stagnation online.

However other organizations can and do work towards the same goals. I'm one of the creators of Tent[1] which shares a lot in common with Persona (including some community members) but is more ambitious in many ways.

In the Persona AAR Mozilla identified several reasons for Persona's failure to gain adoption[2] including that Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)". Tent's primary purpose is as a user data store and also supports features like address changes automatically (which Persona never did).

We were fans of and friendly with the Persona team, but I believe the best solutions to these problems will come from teams that aren't afraid to think bigger than Mozilla's strategy at the time allowed.

The work of federated identity solutions will continue on Tent and other projects, many of which are probably better suited for a wide variety of users and products than Persona would have been. Of course none of us have (or are likely to gain) the level of institutional (or financial) support that Persona had.

[1] https://tent.io

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR

Okay, spammer...

> Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)"

That sounds like a feature. Gathering ever-creepier amounts of personal information to serve marginally-more-effective ads is a losing game.

> That sounds like a feature.

Its not, really. Its more the absence of an undesirable cost -- which is an advantage to end users, only if they get the benefit, which is access to services. But if the services don't adopt it because alternative log-in schemes that offer them more (both in terms of pre-existing user base and data from that user base) then what it really offers users is a "single sign-on" with nothing to sign on to.

> Okay, spammer...

Oh please, it's not as if Tent wasn't entirely germane to the topic of conversation. People plug their stuff all the time on HN, and as long as there's disclosure and it's relevant, I don't see the problem.

Also, you're missing the fact that users aren't the ones building services. A service that doesn't attract any services is useless to users. I'm not saying that Persona fits that description, but it's a fair point to bring up in terms of the spectrum between compromise and ideological pureness.

That's essentially a quote from the link he provided to Mozilla talking about why Persona didn't gain widespread adoption

I'm not sure that the "need" you're talking about is a practical one, though. Maybe it's an ideological "need", at best. More than enough people and websites seem to be getting by just fine without using Persona.

I think if there truly was a pressing need for Persona, we would have seen it get adopted rapidly and quickly. That's exactly what happened with Firefox. That's also what happened with Thunderbird, although to a lesser extent.

Openness is ideal, but it also requires some demand for that openness. Open systems that aren't adopted are really quite useless.

That's nonsense - for thousands of years human civilisations have got on quite well without democracy or human rights. If there was a pressing need for equality and educating the Romans used to say, it would have happened by now.

We can always take the wrong path, and find it hard or impossible to get back.

We may see an end to a single globally compatible internet in our working lives, we may see an end to strong encryption on devices not years old. Any legal action against these ends is surely something to celebrate?

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