3 ms·

As all things in tech, it was born out of a grand vision of unified identity (in this case) & was squashed by corporate greed into using IDs of commercial tools

As all things in tech, it was born out of a grand vision of unified identity (in this case) & was squashed by corporate greed into using IDs of commercial tools for authentication into other commercial tools. I've dreamed many times about my Matrix or Nostr identity serving as the ultimate key to all the tools & services I access, but as the greed turns grand visions into their parodies, these grand visions can't exist without financial support & motivation in some sort of gain for some party. No one is going to implement a free, unified ID, not attached to a commercial product, which is going to get wide spread adoption. Many tried, and just as many have failed. Such is life.

high_priest 3y ago
Now that I think about it, the government in my country has been experiencing a sudden boom in IT infra quality in recent years. The government tied authentication system works pretty well for all the government related tasks. Although quality of its implementation is still a bit factured & heavily reliant on fiat banking services, it is one ID system that comes to mind as 'widely & universally adopted' [among government related entities]
gregmac 3y ago
I was enthusiastic about OpenID when it came out. I actually had been idly building an almost identical thing (proof of concept stage, but it wasn't sure how to get the needed widespread adoption so didn't pursue it much further) but stopped once I found OpenID. What I really liked was you could login with your own IdP, so for example you typed in "yourdomain.com" and got redirected to authenticate (no interaction if you already had a live session on your IdP). You could enable this with an html meta tag, even if you didn't run the actual provider. Unfortunately the only big site I used that had it was stack overflow. I haven't followed as closely but I don't think OpenID Connect (which is based on oath2) even allows this; instead it only works with the providers the site operator has decided to enable it for. Which of course are typically just the big ones.

high_priest 3y ago

Now that I think about it, the government in my country has been experiencing a sudden boom in IT infra quality in recent years. The government tied authentication system works pretty well for all the government related tasks. Although quality of its implementation is still a bit factured & heavily reliant on fiat banking services, it is one ID system that comes to mind as 'widely & universally adopted' [among government related entities]

gregmac 3y ago

I was enthusiastic about OpenID when it came out. I actually had been idly building an almost identical thing (proof of concept stage, but it wasn't sure how to get the needed widespread adoption so didn't pursue it much further) but stopped once I found OpenID. What I really liked was you could login with your own IdP, so for example you typed in "yourdomain.com" and got redirected to authenticate (no interaction if you already had a live session on your IdP). You could enable this with an html meta tag, even if you didn't run the actual provider. Unfortunately the only big site I used that had it was stack overflow. I haven't followed as closely but I don't think OpenID Connect (which is based on oath2) even allows this; instead it only works with the providers the site operator has decided to enable it for. Which of course are typically just the big ones.