Comment by itsdrewmiller
4 years ago
One possible advantage web3 has over Persona is that it is not under the control of Mozilla or whatever foundation Mozilla set up to address those very predictable concerns. Being distributed might help it gain early adopter mindshare which could lead to future UX improvements. (Not saying I believe this will definitely happen, just that Persona failing isn't a guarantee of failure here.)
If it only were Persona the thing that failed... But I've seen quite a lot of attempts at federated identity and turns out people don't care too much about that. People just want to login to whatever site to do things. Login with Twitter/FB/whatever is offered to reduce login friction, not because people think of them as identity providers. Offering "another identity provider" is solving the part of the problem most users really don't care for.
Persona wasn't under the control of Mozilla, either. You could still use it today, if you were willing to set up your own identity server, and if you could find any websites that supported it.
That’s a lot of words to say “this will have better marketing thanks to crypto hype.”
Seems to be the selling point of most web3 and blockchain solutions once you brush the buzzwords off the copy.
The best product doesn't win, the 'sexiest' ones do because they can drum up the press coverage and mainstream recognition necessary to become a household name.
WeWork might not have a a 'tech' company, but it behaved like one after juicing on all that Softbank money. Turns out they had nothing Regus or other 'boring' companies couldn't provide. But they bought a lot prestige properties and advertised constantly, so they became the household name for co-working.
This doesn't explain why Persona didn't work. Unless we understand why it didn't work and show how web3 alleviates the problem, how is anyone to believe a web3 login system will work? You could also ask what has changed since Persona tried and failed? In other words, why now?
Web3 login has been working for awhile. I've used uniswap for example and it's a fantastic experience.
What percentage of all web logins are using web3 vs web2? When we say "work" here, we mean taking market share.