Most Efficient & Least Painful Way to Upgrade Legacy Internet Identities
This is currently the most efficient and least painful method to upgrade legacy Internet Identities while clearly seeing which ID belongs to what.
If you have legacy IDs lying around, this method is strongly recommended.
Step-by-step Upgrade Method
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Go to:
1. https://id.ai/legacy -
Remove all existing passkeys, assuming:
- Your recovery phrase is verified
- You can successfully recover the identity if needed
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Add one new passkey only
- Name it something like
legacyor the legacy ID number - The exact name does not matter
- Name it something like
-
Make sure this is the only passkey listed for that identity
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Go to:
https://id.ai -
Sign in ā Continue with passkey
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Click Upgrade
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Enter your legacy ID
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Continue
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(optional) Additional step remove all the unknown/duplicated passkeys(windows link guide) on windows
VoilĆ .
From testing, this appears to be the most reliable and least confusing way to upgrade.
Issue 1: Passkey Naming Causes Confusion
On https://id.ai/legacy, the name you assign to a passkey is ignored at the OS level.
For example:
- On Windows, the passkey is always saved as āInternet Identityā
- The passkey name cannot be changed, also an windows? restriction
- This becomes very confusing when managing multiple legacy IDs
Suggested improvement:
Allow the system to automatically use the name set on id.ai/legacy instead of defaulting to āInternet Identityā.
Issue 2: Adding Additional Devices Is Not Intuitive
When adding another device (for example, a phone):
- Go to https://id.ai
- Sign in ā Continue with passkey
You are only given two options:
- Create new identity
- Use existing identity
Whatās missing is a third option that takes users directly to:
https://id.ai/activate#<secret_code>
This would solve a large number of onboarding and recovery issues.
Current workaround:
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Click Use existing identity
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Swipe or close the screen
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You are then redirected to https://id.ai/activate#<secret_code>
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Same behavior on desktop see video
This works, but feels accidental rather than intentional UX.
Final thoughts:
The upgrade process can be smooth, but currently relies too much on users discovering unintuitive flows.
A few small UX improvements would save users hours of frustration and reduce support overhead.