> Sure, you can read the news and comments posted on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/) webiste, but you most certainly CANNOT post comments without having an account.
Many sites allow anonymous posting. Even those that don't, you can create an "anonymous" throwaway account. That doesn't work for Facebook because an anonymous throwaway account would have no friends and no more access to anything than not logging in at all.
You don't need what Facebook is doing for access control. The alternative is to post encrypted content and only give the key to people you want to allow access to.
Probably what that really needs to be popular is support for encoding a decryption key into a URI which isn't passed to the webserver but rather used by the client's browser to decrypt content from the server.
Many sites allow anonymous posting. Even those that don't, you can create an "anonymous" throwaway account. That doesn't work for Facebook because an anonymous throwaway account would have no friends and no more access to anything than not logging in at all.
You don't need what Facebook is doing for access control. The alternative is to post encrypted content and only give the key to people you want to allow access to.
Probably what that really needs to be popular is support for encoding a decryption key into a URI which isn't passed to the webserver but rather used by the client's browser to decrypt content from the server.