I see just 1 very practical benefit to the user here:
- Pick your name. Whatever it is. It doesn’t matter if anyone else picked it already. We can, just like in the real world, have 100 of Mikes. In discourse, if you’re the only @mike in the room, you’ll be the only one notified. Else, well, it’s like calling for “Mike” when there are many there. You’re free to pick a different nick at anytime. There’s no @mike in the room? There could come up a list based on mikes you frequently talk to, so you can pick one and shout out for him.
The other alleged benefit is not so practical in reality today. It’s actually an annoyance:
- Forgot your password? Wait, there is no need for passwords! And you don’t have to share your data with Google or Facebook. And no redirecting back and forth. It’s a simple authentication process, much more secure than anything else, and if you’re a power user, you don’t even need a password manager anymore. How? You only need to keep your key safe.
That’s the problem, right there. How can you make grampa keep his key safe? Or remember a password only him can remember? What’s worse: you lose that single one passkey means you lose access to everything?!
A combination of U2F with biometrics might be getting close to the answer. But maybe we’ll never be able to come up with something that can scale up properly, without an Ai better than whatever we have today anyway.