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Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

Persona is moving into maintenance mode until/unless it can come up with a better strategy for driving adoption. Some related info:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR

Both the team and some of the underlying technology are now at work on Firefox Accounts, which is a simpler (non-federated) system that will power the new Firefox Sync service, the Firefox Marketplace (for installable web apps on Firefox OS and other platforms), and other Mozilla services.

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That's too bad, I was really excited about Persona. I didn't really grok Firefox Accounts from the announcement, but reading above helped, then I found https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Firefox_Accounts#What.27s_... which explains more.

I get the sense from your comment and link that there's a real risk that Persona will be abandoned in a few years?

It seems like they expected Persona to get substantial adoption before it was even finalized and then declared it a failure when that didn't happen.

In hindsight we did indeed spend too much time experimenting and tweaking, and not enough time saying "it's good enough" and driving it to completion.

But it's open source :) we're still working on getting it there. The next release will dramatically scale back the API complexity, lock in the APIs and data formats, and pave the way for native browser extensions, self-hosted polyfills, etc.

The only change is that Mozilla isn't funding new feature development in Persona this year since Firefox OS has slightly more time-sensitive / urgent needs. Persona is still actively supported by Mozilla, and is a critical part of our own infrastructure.

Persona ain't going away so long as we're still relying on it.

I'm not sure what the long-term plan will end up being. I personally hope it can find a new direction to grow eventually. (Note: I'm a Mozilla developer but I don't work on Persona or Firefox Accounts.) We use Persona extensively for our own sites and tools, so I'm sure there would be some sort of migration process if Persona were ever shut down in favor of some replacement.

For a more informed answer, you can ask the team directly in the mailing list or IRC channels listed at the bottom of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona#Join_the_Identit...

[Edit: Or see callahad's reply in this thread.]

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