4 ms·
We've had 10+ years now of failures to build a proper federated authentication system (RIP OpenID). The problem isn't technical, and it's only a little bit prod
by NelsonMinar 11y ago
We've had 10+ years now of failures to build a proper federated authentication system (RIP OpenID). The problem isn't technical, and it's only a little bit product design. The problem is political. The big companies with the influence to support a system like Persona don't want it. Facebook, Google, etc believe they can own identity on the Internet themselves, so they won't support a neutral identity provider. Which is a terrible situation for users.
Mozilla absolutely is the right kind of organization to try to attack this Gordian knot.
- wpietri 11y agoI totally agree with the first paragraph, but I'm not convinced on the second. Mozilla is right in the sense that they're independent and a not-for-profit. But they're also small relative to the other players, with more limited resources. They also just don't seem to be very good at politics and/or building business partnerships. In particular here they seemed to solve it as mainly a technical problem. They apparently launched it with the assumption that its existence alone was sufficient to generate uptake, which even at the time seemed naive to me. And then after a while they shrugged, said, "looks like it doesn't work" and closed it down. That doesn't seem like the right organization to me.
- NelsonMinar 11y agoI agree the Mozilla organization has failed here. I guess I don't know any other neutral organization that could do this. We have precious few user-advocacy organizations out there. It's outside EFF's bailiwick. I don't think Apache is any better at politics than Mozilla.