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How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

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Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#101

Post by Vinnl »

frabcus wrote: post #85
edhelas wrote: post #77

By reading the Solid website I was wondering if it was not basically what OpenID tried to offers 10 years ago? https://openid.net/what-is-openid/ > OpenID allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords. > You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID,…

There are some similarities. But the key difference are: 1) Solid is designed for you to store large, complete sets of data you care about over the protocol. OpenID is mainly about identity, and the associated bits of metadata are small and can't be written to by the OpenID protocol. 2) Solid separates the data storage from the application provider. So all your data could be in your Solid personal data store, and non…

In that sense, I think it's more like https://remotestorage.io/

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#102

Post by yason »

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices.

What I'm worried about is actively preventing decentralized, small-scale or hackership services.

If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR, or I can't host my own email server, or serve HTTP out of my home box, or get decent bandwidth for a private virtual network, Tor, I2P or IPFS while Netflix works at full speed, or do about anything else than initiate HTTP/HTTPS connections to known big company grade services or be flagged as a malicious endpoint, then there will not be a decentralised network living within the same infrastructure as the centralised behemoths. And that is the death people are talking about.

A marginal decentralised segment of the current internet is still larger than the whole decentralised internet in its early years. As long as the old ways of networking can live, develop, and grow along with the FANG & co that's fine. But it might not be taken for granted, eventually.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#103

Post by keithnz »

my biggest worry is that the "granular permissions" just won't work. People already just say "Yes" to give away their data, this actually seems to make it easier to get to a lot of personal data because people will just say "Yes" to whatever is asked for when they want to use a service.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#104

Post by amelius »

Why didn't we have these problems back in the days when telephony got started?

Shouldn't we go back to some of the core values we had back then?

Also, when the internet started, universities and government institutions were inventing and running the internet, while companies were just providing the hardware. Seems like a better model to me in principle, although we need stricter privacy regulation.

It seems stupid to hand our data to ... the entities that have an incentive to abuse our data.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#105

Post by adim86 »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #56
zsck wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty clearly not the case. Apple and Facebook are companies, not platforms. The platforms these companies develop are wildly successful and loved by developers. I think you may be too focused on how developers decide a platform that is already successful. In that case, yes, which one is already adopted the most deserves strong consideration. However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the pl…

> However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the platform that developers flock to that tend to succeed, all else being equal. Perhaps, but I struggle to think of two comparable platforms with similar user adoption and significantly different developer interest, outside of there being different sets of developers that hate/love each (c.f. iOS and Android). I'm definitely not aware of any examples ind…

Windows Phone is a platform that died cause developers did not get it. I think the issue I have with your PS3 example is that it is PS3, PlayStation was already on its third iteration. With PS2 being one of the most successful consoles of all time, companies were baked into that ecosystem. Whatever Playstation gave them, they had to work with, they fed their families that way. But I agree with the comment above. Developers support platforms (That are not yet popular) because they find it inspiring, they, in turn, give feedback to what they dislike about the platform, and if the platform has good management and responds quickly, developers work to grow that platform out. All great platforms I know today are because the company behind them inspired developers on what they could achieve using it.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#106

Post by seanhunter »

kromem wrote: post #8
dustingetz wrote: post #2

Can anyone name one for-profit company that wants to build software on Solid?

It's not like the early Internet was a haven of for profit companies in the early days. Early on most of the profit was in providing the access, not the content.

This would be competing against the existing internet though, where there are a lot of for-profit companies fuelling the content (for the consumer). If I'm a business I need to decide whether to back a scrappy startup infrastructure with no users or to go with the established internet with a vast potential customerbase. If I'm a user I need to decide between the existing internet with vast swathes of content and huge numbers of different services and this new network with better protections for my privacy but basically none of the above.

The early internet was innately disruptive and extremely different from anything that was there before. This doesn't have that advantage as far as I can see.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#107

Post by Juliate »

yason wrote: post #102

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices…

"People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let the King and nobles be educated, decide, rule them and govern the country." could have said many 3 centuries ago.

Cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association.

"Because freedom of association necessarily recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organisation, aside from the government, it has been a primary target for repression by all dictatorial societies."

And that freedom is rather young (19th century).

Hosting/owning data and the processes on them is no different as an exercise of sovereignity.

At this point, today, it's more a matter of law (it must be recognized and guaranteed) than a matter of ability (it's possible) or market (it exists). That's where the battle is.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#108

Post by wilsonnb3 »

mmt wrote: post #31
paulddraper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it possible See "Economies of Scale" [1] To the degree that efficiency is increased with larger scale, the market will become an oligopoly or monopoly. Most things are economies of scale: healthcare, social networks, manufacturing, network protocols. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Volunteer (distributed) computing projects demonstrate that even scale can be decentralized.

I’m unaware of any such project that operates on even a hundredth of the scale of the centralized sites that people want to replace. Facebook, Twitter, google, etc.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#109

Post by spiritcat »

eksemplar wrote: post #75
feanaro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most developers I know use MacBooks, my own staff included I'm just letting you know that we both apparently have very biased samples on this matter.

Yes, people are different. :) When I was 20 years younger most developers I knew loved Linux. So maybe she plays in. I know I left gentoo for a Mac in 2006 and I’ve never looked back. I don’t dislike Linux by the way, I just don’t want to spend time configuring things anymore.

perhaps gentoo was not a good fit for you?

currently develop on mac but still linux at home

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#110

Post by tpxl »

yason wrote: post #102

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices…

>If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR

GDPR does not prevent people from hosting forums

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