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Email + magic link is a lot better for most use cases.

It's a lot simpler to implement (just one flow instead of signin / signup / forgot), less catastrophic when your data is breached, piggybacks on the significant amount of work that already goes into securing email, gives you 90% of the benefits of 2FA / FIDO / Web Authn / whatever for free with 0 implementation cost, makes account sharing harder (good for business), and is easy to extend/replace with oAuth for specific domains.



Is actively avoid services that only offer magic link Auth - it’s the most annoying shitty method that pushes all the work on me.

No I won’t log into my email multiple times per day because you are too lazy to hash passwords.

It always depends on the audience but if your users are somewhat technically literate you need passwords.


> Email + magic link is a lot better for most use cases.

Wouldn't systems like this put a lot of trust on their users? Say you use a magic link on an compromised wifi network, like in a hotel, coffee shop, airport and so on without being on a VPN. Which some users will inevitable do.

I completely agree with the "most use cases" though. As long as you can't change the associated e-mail without additional requirements.


After you have logged in, you will get a session cookie/key that you have to send on every request. An adversary can just steal that session key from the compromised connection.


https end-to-end encrypts what’s in the address, except for the domain.


And that's also a great way to piss the user off…




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