+1 for Persona. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436123
Re: privacy / security, I really wish they hadn't dropped Thunderbird.
Re: privacy / security, I really wish they hadn't dropped Thunderbird.
I really wish Mozilla would change their mind and start developing this again. It feels like they expected all major websites to support it on the first year, and, when that didn't happen, they decided to drop it.
Does the same stand for Persona?
Perhaps instead of asking Firefox to do the legwork we should be contributing some of our own time to the projects we want to see succeed.
Pastery looks awesome. It appears that you're using Pygments server-side?
Why would a pastebin site need auth/login/userids ?
All I can think of is editing pastes, but isn't it easier to just create a new (anonymous) paste instead of editing ?
Though, these can be solved with tokens per post, it's tough to remember/maintain multiple tokens, doesn't work out in practice.
I'd prefer not to have accounts, and Ghostbin tries to avoid keeping identifiable information around, but they do come in fairly handy for maintaining control of the things you've pasted and the right to revoke them.
Session cookies aren't quite up to the task, since they can't stick around forever and are difficult to bring with you between workspaces.
(edit to elaborate on "avoid keeping identifiable information": account names are hashed, the account never stores user identification, and a paste doesn't track which account created it. For most intents and many purposes, the creator of a paste is anonymous. We could get into drawing correlations between all the pastes owned by an account, but I'm not particularly interested in sitting around and doing that.)
I don't think I'd have started Pastery if I'd seen Ghostbin, as I was looking for a pastebin that wasn't ugly, and I hadn't found any that qualified.
Have you had any abuse problems at all?
"with Mozilla Labs somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there."
Commercial adoption? What does that even mean in the context of MoCo? What does MoCo sell? And 24 months? Makes no sense, even for MoCo. Google is consistently a small player in the Cloud Computing Platform space. Their response: "we're not going away." MoCo has scores of millions in the bank. I'm still baffled.
Obviously, it doesn't need adoption to "survive", but it does need adoption to succeed in its goals: rescuing users from stupid hack-job login systems.
I would compare it more to Chrome: Google made Chrome with the goal of getting the web to work better for some people, so they could more easily consume Google's various services. You could say that Chrome's bottom line was "increased Google service adoption": if Chrome renders faster and provides more HTML5 features, then Google gets more and happier customers for their products.
Mozilla doesn't have "services" that Persona is a loss-leader for, but there's still that same ROI calculation of whether Persona is achieving its goals, and measuring adoption rate is a good proxy for that.
The important thing, that Mozilla failed to do, was to actually understand what an adoption curve for something like Persona should look like, and what things affect it. They needed to heavily advertise it (to developers, not to users!) over about two years, and then start looking at the adoption curve.