So how is a pod different than a self-hosted database?
Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
61–70 of 263 posts
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#62What’s not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint.
In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc
In order to do that, there are a few hurdles:
- You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone’s POD.
- More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to. For example: I may want to provide heart rate data from my runs, workouts, and temperature data but not GPS. That’s getting very granular
- Since every app will have different or possibly new types of data, having a central standard for data types and ACLs will be tough.
- You’ll also need a mapping mechanism for where the data is stored and how it’s named and the formats that are being used. Even within a single app, you can denotmalize data and store it in multiple places for different purposes.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#63applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
I don't understand the premise. Tumblr is / was over ten times larger than Geocities. It did what you're describing. It was still wildly popular with young people just as recently as a few years ago.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#64applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists. For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
Because there's no gopher client for macOS.
I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose. But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The and tags and now defunct concepts like VR…
> And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.
I feel like that's not all that rare—you just do it as a series of blog posts these days. You could make a strong case that a set of independent pages that freely interlink is a better format, but still, the impulse is there, so people have found a way to make that kind of content.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#66Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I s…
Same. I clicked "about solid" and it gave no clue what solid is.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#67applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
Nostalgic yeah, but that doesn't mean very much... After all, those discovering the web today will feel nostalgia for the current version in N years. As exciting as those days were, I wouldn't want to go back to dial-up, CRT monitors, no-broadband, no-wi-fi, no-wikipedia, no-dropbox, no-stackoverflow, no-git, no-digital-distribution, etc.
No spam. No tracking. No monetization. No clickbait.* No Zuckerberg. No profiling. No selling surfing habits. No social credit score. No tying insurance rates to activity monitors. No bosses firing people for expressing their personal opinions on private time. No HR minions making hiring decisions based on personal web spaces.
And yes there was broadband in the old days. It just wasn't widely distributed. It was mostly at businesses and universities. As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier.
On the plus side, future generations will never know the horrors of a RealPlayer "Buffering..." message.
* Unless you really needed punch that monkey.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#68applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to re…
I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.
Douglas Adams expressed this well:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.
Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#69The hard part is ID, you need either a centralized authority or a standard specification.
Solid uses the latter.
WebID-TLS: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/tip/spec/tls-respec.ht...
WebID-OIDC: https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc-spec
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#70Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I s…
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloate…
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people.
Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.