The reason I prefer this idea over something like Persona is I hate the idea of giving all websites a single email address to contact me. At present I use Gishpuppy to create a new email address for each domain that'll forward to my main inbox. If any site starts spamming or has their database accessed by spammers, I simply delete that email address and immediately get rid of the spam. This is a basic ability I lose with centralised systems like OpenID or Persona, who could implement this feature but haven't.
> This is a basic ability I lose with centralised systems like OpenID or Persona
I'm confused. Neither Persona nor OpenID are centralized, but that might be beside the point. What sort of concerns do you have with Persona's architecture?
> I hate the idea of giving all websites a single email address to contact me
Then... don't? Persona lets you use as many addresses as you want. It already works with any valid email address, which means you can keep using all of your existing GishPuppy addresses. You can keep using your one-address-per-domain scheme with Persona. No problem.
It does work for the use case for a handful of different email addresses(work and personal for example), but not when you're using a new email address for every single domain.
The ideal workflow for me would be to sign in to persona using my Gmail address as my single identity, and then have it auto-generate (or retrieve by posting details to a Gishpuppy URL) an email address for that specific domain, and only pass that on to the website. In the current model I still need to confirm each new email address by clicking on a link, which reduces the value of a single login greatly. Also, I don't want to be choosing between 900+ Gishpuppy addresses when signing into a site again.
This might not be the ideal workflow for everyone, but its a feature I can't include, because of the lack of API hooks or extensions. Using 'the modest proposal' on the other hand, I could chain together browser extensions sufficiently to add the functionality I need, to get new email addresses from Gishpuppy and existing credentials from LastPass. I guess the word I was going for was not centralised, but inextensible.
> In the current model I still need to confirm each new email address by clicking on a link
That problem would go away if GishPuppy supported the Persona natively -- do you have contact info for someone at GishPuppy? I'd be happy to work with them to make that happen.
> I don't want to be choosing between 900+ Gishpuppy addresses when signing into a site again.
Persona locally remembers your last-used address, so this shouldn't be a problem, though we could probably improve the UX. We're currently trying to figure out how to sync this data in a way that's opaque to Mozilla.
> The ideal workflow for me would be to [...] have [Persona] auto-generate [...] an email address for that specific domain
I agree, but we're totally in the minority. Since you've already talked about chaining together browser extensions, you could easily do the same thing with Persona. It'd only take a small Greasemonkey script on the login.persona.org origin to make that work.
