Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

I've never seen a compelling explanation of how this is supposed to work. Do people self-host their pods? Is the pod one more thing to sign up with an external provider?

If I'm self-hosting my pod anyway, then wouldn't I want my self-hosting to include the (for example) photo-library viewing layer instead of giving google photos or flickr access to the photos in my pod? If I did give them access, then how is it more private than if they hosted it themselves? Maybe the pitch is more about mobility of services and avoiding lock-in than it is about privacy and security, but that doesn't seem to be the message I get. Does anyone have any pro-solid blog posts or articles you think might be helpful in convincing me? It smells like it is well aligned with my values but I just can't see how it will actually work.

Solid seems like an idea that only makes sense if your key goal is allowing cloud providers to offer proprietary services that use your data, while still storing it elsewhere.

But I'd say most people fall either into "I don't mind proprietary services holding my data" or "I want to self-host the preferably open source application and my data". I don't see the benefit of separating the two at all, and I think the only reason this project keeps coming up and around is the name of the guy pushing it.

"Solid is a mid-course correction for the Web by its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee" is very literally the only selling point I think Solid has.

Sandstorm or Cloudron have a better model, self-host (or pay someone to host for you) all of your apps and data together, in an easy interface for adding new apps like an app store.

I attended the presentation of Tim Berners Lee at MozFest 2018 where he outlined the Solid Project, and I've been waiting to see this project evolve. I'd like to see some more documentation and a 'get started' kind of tutorial to make this pretty abstract concept understandable. Looking around the project pages doesn't give me much incentive to start using it yet.

I'd love to see a 'Solid for dummies' kind of approach in the documentation, things are quite technical still. Some easy to understand examples would be nice!

Solid seems like a great technological idea. It empowers people to own their data and give others and apps access to it. This is empowering.

But!!!! people want useful things. Things that help them solve problems so they want to pick up those things. Solid is lacking these solutions right now.

Where is my todo list, contact app, calendar app, and so forth... all built on solid? This is an opportunity. But, until these kinds of the solutions exist for solid it's going to stay as a neat technology that's not bridged the gap to be useful.

You can choose whether to self-host or whether to have someone else handle that for you.

As for also hosting your apps: I think the answer to that is the same as for why you might still choose to use an email client even if you're hosting your email server.

However, I would expect the majority of people not to self-host, but to have that handled by a party they trust. They would then not be limited by that host also having to support the particular photo-viewing layer they are interested in, but instead are able to choose one independently.

(Disclosure: I work for Inrupt, but opinions are my own.)