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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • EDIT: seems like it’s both simpler and more complex than I thought to achieve what I want. https://codeberg.org/PassFF/passff/issues/581 suggests it is “just” a local tweak. At the same time, any search I make for finding an actual implementation guide for authenticators is buried under pages of results for using passkeys in your own web app. The ecosystem’s current state seems to be “don’t bother, just trust us!”. Even the damn “passkeys.com” site is a barely disguised ad for OwnID.

    I dunno, the browser could open a file picker and let me point it towards the passkey, or perhaps let me paste the key contents into a field?

    It’s been several months since I looked into it, so maybe things have changed since, but I don’t see why the browser has to be hooked up to my password manager through a mechanism that seemingly can’t be user-piloted nor user-intercepted. How does a browser API require some external third-party software to be installed and configured to work?! It’s a public/private key pair at the end of the day, right? Not some novel algorithm, protocol, or whatever. Why can’t I simply tell the browser “here is where my existing passkeys reside; place any newly generated ones here as well”? Or perhaps “here is the program to call and here are the arguments to supply when you need to create and/or retrieve a given passkey”?

    I don’t think I have claimed the standard itself is locking anyone out - let me correct that if I did. I have just not found a way to not be locked out of the feature itself in the products of big players like Google - my Google account(s) being the one service where I feel like I could actually benefit from using passkeys over passwords (not to mention one of those I have seen pushing the “replace all your passwords with passkeys!” messaging).

    To be specific, my password manager is http://passwordstore.org/, (“the standard Unix password manager”).



  • Personal anecdote to illustrate: the last time I tried creating and using passkeys for my Google account, I got the impression they (Google) would only accept keys coming from either Google Authenticator (their 2fa smartphone app) or something like macos’s built-in keychain. No way to give them a key generated using a local, offline service that I could store however I want - it needed to be accessible using, basically, a big corpo['s software] as the intermediary. This coming from how their website would request the keys from my browser (which means mozilla seem to be in on it as well :/).

    Given that I currently use a pure file-based password manager that I can move around and switch the keys for as I please, the current state of passkeys feels like a step back in terms of allowing me to control my digital identities.















  • Lemmy shows you a community’s posts in order — a big room really is a room with more people in it.

    This is … wrong and misleading? The default sorting order for posts is “Active”. You can sort by “New” (as well as a whole bunch of other sorting methods) but it’s never been the only option. Maybe OP is on an instance who has set their default sorting order to “New”?

    Furthermore, what is this “room” verbiage? Maybe it’s just an attempt at descriptive metaphor. To me, it comes off as mixing up Matrix rooms and Lemmy communities.

    And then there’s the line

    Which instance you’re on matters about as much as which community

    Which (imo) misses how many instances, in practice, self-select who posts from them. I think there’s a degree to which these numbers reflect how much each instance’s userbase tends to get replies, but without more detail on what these uses are posting it’s a correlation at best and noise at worst.