You know, you're one of the people in the best position to start a "New Persona" project — it's not something just anybody can pick up. You know what went right and wrong in Mozilla's approach both on the social and technical side. You also know how to best leverage the existing Persona userbase (eg keeping some backwards compatibility).

I would love to donate my time for a cause like this and I know I'm not the only one. Shoot me an email if you ever go through with it.

I would also love to help out. But I also refrain from starting that on my own. "New Persona" (or "Persona NG?") should be started and managed by somebody who knows what they are doing.

It would be really great if some Persona insider would provide an umbrella for this and review the activities, if they they don't have the time to do the actual work. I'd love to join such a project.

There wouldn't need to be a new version of any sort, Mozilla released the Persona project to the community. It can still be improved upon.

I would also like to help with reigniting Mozilla Persona.

Is there a lessons learned / recommendations for the next attempt writeup?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR is a pretty good place to start.

Thanks. I hadn't seen the comment linked to before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465 most informative explanation I've seen.

How do you make the persona brand invisible, while still giving users some visible feedback that they aren't sending their global password to random site x?

Persona didn't have the notion of a global password -- the ideal flow had you authenticating with your email provider, on their domain, which was often completely transparent in cases where you were already signed in to that provider.

Try logging into 123done.org with whatever you want @mockmyid.com to get a sense of what that would ideally look like. My talk from PyCon 2013 goes into a little detail about how the protocol works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJff23UdNAI

With most email accounts being provided by gmail, outlook, and yahoo, I don't see auth via email domain ever happening.

Why? Gmail is already supporting that.

The question is how do you effectively communicate that to users without establishing a Persona brand?