Is Persona the Authentication System That We’ve All Been Waiting For? (2012)

I like Persona and – about a year ago – was thinking of using the service in a medium sized project I'm managing. I did some experiments and it (technically) worked fine for our purposes, and educating users on its use didn't seem too hard either. In the end though, I decided to roll our own (simple) authentication system because of a lack of hard guarantees that Persona (the service) would still exist a few years down the line.

I don't like to depend on external factors for long term projects that go into maintenance mode and this is very much a problem with 3rd party authentication.

We could of course try to install the Persona server ourselves, but that seemed like a bit too much effort considering the size of the project.

In short, Persona good, uncertainty around it bad. I guess it suffers from a chicken-and-egg (or critical mass) problem.

Persona solved a real problem in a straight-forward manner, which, in today's web, is a surefire way to fail. People often complain about things (Facebook being a walled garden, Twitter mucking up third party clients, authentication being broken etc.), but then end up giving in to convenience.