Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

Projects like this never seem to pan out. It solves a problem people should care about but most aren't motivated to act on.

> Even if you do hand your pod over to some company, it'll be like letting them host your domain name or manage your cell phone number. If you don't like what they're doing, you can always move your pod -- just like you can take your cell phone number and move to a different carrier. This will give users a lot more power.

The domain name analogy scares me rather than reassures me. Sure, DNS was created in good faith to be as distributed as possible, but is it? There are recent stories that show that individuals do not have as much control on domain names as one would ideally like. See these stories -

- Sinkholed: https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/ (domain name hijack by German authority by accident)

- The duck tape holding the internet together: https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-inte... (loss of control on domain name due to registrar error)

While the idea behind Solid sounds solid but the moment they talk about outsourcing pod hosting to third-party pod hosting providers, I get worried. Would it lead to walled gardens of pods? (Example GMail for emails) Would they add non-standard convenience features to create vendor lock-ins (Example GitHub for Git)? Would they abuse their power due to vendor lock-in (Example Sourceforge for SVN)?

As much as I like the idea (and the people behind it), I have an hard time seeing how this can succeed.

The idea of pod reminds me of the self-hosting movement: people -including myself - host a bunch of services to avoid sharing fundamental data, like email, GPS-history or contacts.

Still, "self-hosters" interact with all the big personal data hoarder out there (FB, Google, the many ad and tracking companies) which expose them to the same abuses as any other internet user.

Basically, I don't really see a company like FB play ball with these guys, for two reasons:

1) the privatization of data would be a existential threat to their business model

2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

But I also hope to be dead wrong!

I think the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here - expecting something to never go wrong just means you'll never ship anything. Pods will break in ways that no one can foresee. That's not good, but giving up and not trying would be worse, so users and businesses will have to deal with those problems as best they can.

Don't forget that millions of domain transfers happen every year without going wrong. There are cases like the ones you linked to, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule, thankfully.

This sounds great. I imagine a world where gmail had a setting whereby they had to use my storage for their service, mounted over the internet using SSHFS or something. This would be fantastic! No more IMAP syncing to backup my data. My data would already be my data.

Even if the “pod” is a virtual one in a data center, as long as the webmail provider is a different company to the pod provider, the data access is granular enough, and the terms of service enforce that the data is stored in a way that’s readable by me, this can only be a good thing.

Perhaps legislation could help here? What if the service company starts encrypting the data they store on my pod and refuses to give me the key? It would be good to wield the power of a regulator against bad actors who do this and any other shady rule bending.

Very exciting.