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I haven't looked into Persona since they shut it down, but is it a protocol or a service? If it was actively developed again, would one be able to use Persona without integrating with any Mozilla service at all or would there always be a Mozilla layer involved?

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The backend was called BrowserID, and it was supposed to integrate with your browser and be supported by email providers not be some Mozilla service. It's only a service because they didn't get around to implementing the actual BrowserID design, so they run a service for now, and then they halted development before they even tried to build the actual design!

It is a service. Plus some code to make service integration into your website easy. Sadly, my experience was that it was not very reliable.

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