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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

That's my impression as well. A friend and I created a pastebin as a fun weekend project this weekend (https://www.pastery.net/) and we used Persona for auth, since it's so damn convenient. The only problem is that it loads a bunch of files on every request, and my questions about lazy-loading went unanswered.

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.

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Incidentally, I launched a pastebin (https://ghostbin.com/) some time ago, used Persona for authentication, and absolutely loved it.

Pastery looks awesome. It appears that you're using Pygments server-side?

Serious question for you and your parent:

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 ?

They're primarily for content ownership management.

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.)

Deletion. Modification of pastes and maintaining the same id (URL).

Though, these can be solved with tokens per post, it's tough to remember/maintain multiple tokens, doesn't work out in practice.

Preventing inundation with pastes. This is less of a problem for a small project like this compared to one of the major sites, whose server architecture is probably more robust.

That looks fantastic! I love what you've done with the UI. We do use Pygments, yep, same as you, looks like :)

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 Thunderbird at least, the repo is open and available.

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.

It does - https://github.com/mozilla/persona

How is that relevant? Are you saying that Persona failed because they didn't get enough pull requests from other users?

I think they're saying that even if Mozilla may not decide to actively develop Persona anymore, Persona users and fans would be able to contribute to and further develop the project if the repo is "open and available."

That's not happening, unfortunately. Sometimes you need someone with weight to throw around, or with technical knowledge, or both.

I agree sometimes it takes someone with weight to throw around, but are you saying that person needs to be a Mozilla employee? Because I wouldn't agree with that.

No, it needs to be Mozilla itself.

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