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Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

solidproject.org

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Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#11

Post by Vinnl »

mfer wrote: post #8

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 thes…

There's definitely not many Solid-supporting apps at the moment, but as for the todo list, there is https://noeldemartin.github.io/solid-focus/

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#12

Post by seph-reed »

mawise wrote: post #2

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…

I had this idea a while ago when trying to figure out how we're going to do web-tech in space. Obviously you don't want to send an entire web page, just the data.

If data is clearly templated, it's up to the user to choose a UI for displaying it. Many UIs can compete. They don't have to proprietary.

In time, UI would become an art form; like music.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#14

Post by passive »

Lovely to see this come up again. It's really a great time to promote Solid, with the evidence of shady practices at the big corporations mounting, I know lots of folk would like a way to reclaim some of their data.

That said, I feel like the big starting point for Solid is exfiltration/syncing of data between services, and that appears to be missing, for the most part.

Give folk an app that will pull their music preferences from Spotify, and let them try out Amazon or Apple music with the same collection. It's a very simple data set, and a fairly common and comprehensible use case.

Doing photos from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc would be a bigger lift, but not too much different in concept, and I think very compelling in terms of selling the value of the service.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#15

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mfer wrote: post #8

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 thes…

Indeed, I feel projects like this can invest for years on platform, but fail to foster or develop the core useful apps people want to use. Ultimately, if your platform lacks that, few people will invest long enough to bring those apps from third parties.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#17

Post by XCSme »

rasengan wrote: post #3

I read and it says you have to use a third party host or host on your own [1]. I’m not sure how this differs from the WWW - could someone explain? Thank you! [1] https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod

I was also confused by this, on the home-page it says

> Solid lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods.

Then in the "Get-a-pod" it suggest you should get Amazon for hosting?

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#18

Post by kthejoker2 »

I think something like this makes sense at some # of users closer to 10-20, or maybe even higher numbers, kind of monkeysphere / Dunbar's number level.

That is, a smaller group of people (an extended family, a neighborhood street, a collective ... fine, a cult) band their resources together to pay for pod hardware to realize some savings / distributed back-up, and have "edge" apps for trusted sharing within the pod, and then P2P (pod-to-pod?) apps for sharing outside the pod.

Right now, the economics just don't quite make sense.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#19

Post by passive »

mawise wrote: post #2

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…

The hosting story is still a little messy, but in my version of this, I think it needs a trusted third-party to offer hosting, along with an open committee to manage the data specifications.

The advantages of separating data storage from usage are similar to those in application development. If you have a robust model for defining and retrieving your data, the tools for working with that data can be iterated on independently from the data itself.

So let's say your photos are in Google Photos, because your phone backs them up there automatically, but all your friends who you want to see the photos are on Facebook. Theoretically, "Solid" could be pulling those photos into a standard data specification, and provide easy tools for automating how they get shared into Facebook.

Then let's say you wanted to edit some of those photos, so you open up PhotoShop Solid, and get editing.

But then you join Instagram, and you want to quickly show off your Photoshop skills. All you need to do is connect Solid.

The key aspect here is that you can use as many different tools as you like to work with your data, but it's the same data, and if Facebook goes belly-up tomorrow, or you just don't want your photos there anymore, Solid has your back.

One thing that I don't think is well defined yet, but really should be, is how services will request access to your data. This needs some kind of standard interface, very similar to how phones let you customize app access. It should make it very clear what data you are "selling" to the Facebook, and what they are providing in return for that data.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#20

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #18

I think something like this makes sense at some # of users closer to 10-20, or maybe even higher numbers, kind of monkeysphere / Dunbar's number level. That is, a smaller group of people (an extended family, a neighborhood street, a collective ... fine, a cult) band their resources together to pay for pod hardware to realize some savings / distributed back-up, and have "edge" apps for trusted sharing within the pod,…

I absolutely think the self-hosting story definitely only works for the widespread world if those of us capable of self-hosting provide services to less-technical users we know.
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