Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

solid.inrupt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 263 posts

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#81

Post by reaperducer »

jacobsimon wrote: post #42
mtrn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.

Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#82

Post by Moru »

wpietri wrote: post #68
chongli wrote: post #8

applications :( 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 t…

Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#83

Post by jchanimal »

The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL location-based identifiers roots it firmly in the past.

I think the future is the robust content addressable distributed web. Which could give developers the same flexibility, and users the same friendly experience, but with everything virtualized in a peer to peer mesh. I’d like to see the developer smoothness of Solid married to future-proof content identifiers like this: https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#84

Post by Karrot_Kream »

JepZ wrote: post #36

Two years ago I wrote a little Progressive Web App which stores its data in an offline cache (browser) and syncs to my Nextcloud via WebDAV. IMHO that has pretty much the same advantages that Solid proclaims. I mean, in spirit I seem to value the same things as Solid (decentralized, own your data, etc.), but what I don't understand is why it has to introduce so many abstract/new names when it wants to be 'simple'? Bu…

ActivityPub suffers from this problem as well but has become widely used.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#85

Post by stevew20 »

reaperducer wrote: post #67
Reedx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 most…

"As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier."

100% this. About 8 years ago, I had LIGHTNING fast loading times on every page I visited. 800-1000ms was average, on a connection that is slower than mine is today... Now 4-8 seconds is average, and the new Gmail takes 10-12 seconds to load.

I'm nostalgic for the days when the web was faster and more functional than it is today.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#86

Post by msbarnett »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #5

Maybe 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…

Terrible seem apt. As proposals go, this seems to border on the insanely naive.

It’s impossible to find in the impenetrable marketing speak, but presumably the backend here is some off the shelf LDP? Existing LDPs tend towards being profoundly unscalable; typically the number of clients they can handle without choking per second is in the low single digits. All of the implementations I’ve seen are more concerned with adherence to an ill-conceived shitpile of “standardize-first, use-case later” W3C standards than ever tackling the core performance and protocol problems.

And I cannot imagine a worse choice for presenting Linked Data to the modern web than RDF. It’s ugly, dog-slow to parse, and is INCAPABLE of representing a simple ordered list without significantly painful work-arounds that practically by their nature force N+1 queries on to clients. JSON-LD solves a lot of this and has existed for years.

And then we’ve got yet another attempt to pretend the W3C’s WebACL spec is anything other than a lunatic’s fever-dream of a UI and UX nightmare. We’ll apparently just expose it to end users to let them manage their data. That’ll end well.

The Semantic Web Community’s biggest problem is that they think continually recreating “existing thing but with as many of these awful W3C standards as they can shoehorn in” is some kind of Good in and of itself, no matter how bad the resulting user experience would be.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#87

Post by nulbyte »

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked.

Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run your own Solid server," I successfully installed a single-user solid server. Great, now I have a single-user setup that is supposed to give me control over my data. So how do I authenticate as the single user? No clue. This thing is so secure, not even I can get my data!

I would have expected something more useful from the inventor of a technology that so many people can use today without having to think much about it.

EDIT: I deleted and started over. I still don't know what happened, but now at least I can create an account and login. Still not quite sure what I can do, now.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#88

Post by gfodor »

nulbyte wrote: post #87

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…

AFAICT there are literally no apps to try this on. Why did they decide to announce this and publicize it before a basic, well-polished, example was ready? The pod signup process is using vanilla bootstrap, there wasn't even a visual design pass.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#89

Post by snomad »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #5

Maybe 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…

The Solid Spec from their github. https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#90

Post by topkai22 »

topkai22 wrote: post #78
chongli wrote: post #8

applications :( 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…

It’s not so much the web apps, but the professionalization of content that makes me nostalgic. The charming thing about the early web is that almost all of it looked equally terrible- even the sites made by paid experts looked only marginally better than what junior high schoolers would crank out in computer class (ask me how I know.) This created space for passionate amateurs to create content for their niche. You g…

As follow up- there still is space within some of the walled gardens, primarily YouTube and Twitter, and I’m sure some emerging media will support amateurs early as well. I certainly don’t want to go purely back to webrings, marginal search engines, hand crafted directories, and printed “internet phone books” (yes, this was a thing) as it made it far more difficult to accomplish tasks, but TBL and others fighting against the Balkanization and centralization of the web content as a whole is not a bad thing.
Post reply on HN