| That's so so many steps and requires knowledge of so many things. It has the big two fundamental problems, and a major third one: * Its value prop is poorly explained. As an engineer with a CS degree, I still barely understand what it's talking about (what's an "identity attribute"??) without some digging. * Even if the value prop was well-explained, it's still very high friction compared to "Sign in with <Service I Already Use>". Why would a user download an installer and deal with managing all of their accounts? There's a secure, anonymous, easy, centralized option that does it all for you (Sign in with Apple). That service does it so well that you only have to click a button to log in or sign up. Nothing else required. That isn't achievable without a central authority managing everything for you. * (this is the big one) Your local machine is a major point of failure. If you lose your local machine and haven't backed up your accounts, you just lose access, right? The only solution is either set up a server with periodic backup (too much friction for regular users) or a centralized authority that stores them for you, which defeats the purpose of all of this. This project, to me, falls into the "cool technical stuff category". It's obviously built for "geeks" (lack of a better term) and not for people. That's why centralized tech co's will probably always do this better than open source. They are customer focused just as much as technology focused. Unmonetized open source projects tend to focus more on technology than user experience. That's why you see regular people using monetized software and developers using open source to build monetized software. |
It's not really ready to be used widely at this point. Given that, the fact that the documentation is currently more oriented towards developers working on identity software is fine, I think.
>Even if the value prop was well-explained, it's still very high friction compared to "Sign in with <Service I Already Use>". Why would a user download an installer and deal with managing all of their accounts? There's a secure, anonymous, easy, centralized option that does it all for you (Sign in with Apple). That service does it so well that you only have to click a button to log in or sign up. Nothing else required. That isn't achievable without a central authority managing everything for you.
Sure, installing software is higher-friction than using a centralized service, but it's not that much higher friction. It's not like people don't install software all the time. (And again, this is something that could easily be preinstalled by your OS vendor of choice, which would make the experience very similar to the centralized providers'.)
>Your local machine is a major point of failure. If you lose your local machine and haven't backed up your accounts, you just lose access, right? The only solution is either set up a server with periodic backup (too much friction for regular users) or a centralized authority that stores them for you, which defeats the purpose of all of this.
Yes, this is a big one. No, I don't think those are the only two options. You could sync them between devices if you have more than one (phone/laptop?), you could store them on a user-specified data storage location (think MIT's Solid), etc. I acknowledge that it's a problem, but I think it's a tractable one.
>This project, to me, falls into the "cool technical stuff category". It's obviously built for "geeks" (lack of a better term) and not for people.
I think you're looking at the project as it is, and not as it could be.