alt Hacker NewsThanks for the correction, I didn't think about this approach and it sounds like it should work.
The only comment that I have that if you are already querying users table (or collection in case of NoSQL or whatever), you might as well have a sessions table/collection in the same database/storage and query them together. It seems that difference is not that big.
The purported advantage of stateless sessions is that you can check the auth without querying the main db/storage (maybe only querying a smaller/faster axillary storage).
Think a small (as in client base), but distributed system - i.e. Asia/EU/US locations of a webshop. You can easily replicate/cache your products from a central server, and reuse the cache from the localized ones. But each and every web request would have to be authenticated against a central db somewhere around the world. It is just easier if each node can just validate the JWT themselves by using crypto. All they need to do is maintain a revocation list locally. Now, your revocation list is append-only, can be publicy available and never going to be more than a couple MB. Very easy to replicate/cache this. I can't say the same for a session database.