This highlights another one of the problems, which was explaining what Persona was to people. See, there's _technically_ no such thing as a "Persona account".

This highlights another one of the problems, which was explaining what Persona was to people. See, there's _technically_ no such thing as a "Persona account". Persona is a system that lets you log in with an account that works with the system. Someone who provides an account that supports Persona logins is called an Identity Provider, or IdP. However, most places don't work with the system when it first comes out, so Mozilla provided a "Fallback IdP" that just did straight up email verification. Getting your account from the Fallback IdP is what you probably wanted to do, and AFAIK the only way to do that was to essentially attempt to login with an email that didn't have an account with the Fallback IdP, which would trigger the verification step for you to create an account. This is a bad mixture of a) A confusing concept that's really hard to explain, and b) Bad UX around the fallback IdP and getting an account with it, especially if you don't assume clicking "Sign Up" will work for you. It's complicated by the fact that, if one of your goals is to get other login systems (like Facebook or Google) to support Persona as an IdP, you don't necessarily want to push people towards creating accounts with the fallback. It's hard to get all these things right, and I agree that Persona needs some more work to find a good solution to the problem of creating accounts that work with Persona.