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between passkeys and webp i’m starting to think that software consumers just hate good things

weeder@weeder.bsky.social

Nobody ever explained to me what a passkey is or how they work. Websites just started asking me for passkeys like it's something we talked about.

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unfortunately consumers also love using the same password for everything so sometimes you have to bully them into the future a little

That is a natural instinct, you cannot change that. Passwords are a band-aid, a quick fix for developers, not a user friendly solution.

That may also why "passkeys" get treated with suspicion. This sounds too much alike "passwords", which get universally hated by consumers.

“we're gonna have to drag these people into the 21st century” — someone in a thread about linux adopting rust some years ago

desktop image viewers like the default windows one didn't add support for webp for decades, making the images very hard to use for people.

like obviously people don't want to use formats they can't use properly, even if those formats are superior on a technical level

i can’t believe the fascists at the fido alliance would force us to use biometric data (they don’t) with a standard that prevents syncing passkeys across devices (it doesn’t)

you can reject it if you like, but unless you have the technical background to actually explain why they’re bad then it’s meaningless

Well both are suffering from adoption polish. I like passkeys but until the latest Pixel my Bitwarden wasn't reliable in creating them.

For webp it didn't help that Windows' photo viewer app didn't support them for years. So when a normie downloads an image and can't the view it, is kinda bad ux.

no just dont know bother explaining it carefully enough to you that the problem may not have been the technology itself if the implementation was better or the adoption less of a rough edge

To some extent, its an understandable distrust of everything big tech, on the other hand its a lack of curiosity and care about learning what things even are.

Many people also _refuse_ to just lookup what a passkey is.... and probably would be just as annoyed if given a ten page explanation! And that's not by some personal failing of theirs, but because many parts of our society when this!

It's born out of a societal shunning of curiosity paired with a general i-cant-give-a-fuck-anymore about every new thing the tech world throws at people. It is at the same time quite understandable and _very_ harmful. Like, people get hit with wave after wave of bullshit!

Blockchain!!! Metaverse!!!! GenAI!!!!! All of it sold as the best thing ever, get on or get left behind, all of it scummy and more often then not harmful to most people. So of course, when any _new_ thing comes around, the gut reaction is: "oh no hot this shit again."

i think it would go a lot better if they tried explaining them instead of user-hostile flows like i’ve seen where it basically just demands you add a passkey without any context (amazon does this)

amazon prompts me to make a passkey right after I log in with my passkey, it's great.

like users do hate good things but the passkey rollout has not been executed well at all lol webp is different that’s just client apps not catching up to a format that’s been around for a decade for no reason (including bluesky, as i found out accidentally getting a webp in my profile record)

also some websites let you make multiple passkeys (good, theyre device specific), but then with tailscale i am pretty sure my account is locked to One passkey, i can’t add any more, no options to fix this, so it’s stuck in my single password manager. fun shit

yeah this is specific to tailscale refusing to be an identity provider, which is understandable but very annoying. the official docs recommend a ludicrous workaround

people hate passkeys? i think the real thing is that consumers hate any sort of change they can't see the benefit to

the issue is definitely not passkeys themselves but how they've been pushed out of the blue. 1Password gave me a gentle prod by saying "hey, this site supports passkeys, wanna give it a go?". Gamifying it with the Watchtower also helped my ADHD.

Although, it does break on Nintendo w/ Firefox. 1Password suggested using passwords ironically, lol. Firefox is broken in other things (broke on Bluesky, broke on a bank when trying to change passwords) so I just moved to Vivaldi. I guess they didn't want to suggest that to a Firefox user tho.

Nintendo’s implementation of passkeys is kind of just broken, period. I’m sure locking them to the device they’re created on is marginally more secure, but it’s sure not what I wanted to happen when using 1Password to sync them between my desktop and phone.

Tbf webp sucks in a lot of ways. In the lossy mode, 7.5 bit color, forced chroma subsampling, doesn't reliably beat JPEG. The lossless mode (by Jyrki of later Brotli, WOFF, and JXL fame) is actually good, but it's artificially limited to 8 bits to keep it in line with the lossy mode.

The rollout was pretty bad, being used on the web for like a decade before applications started to support it. Hopefully it goes better for JXL. Most applications already support it before widespread web adoption, we just need Microsoft to get on the program.