I self-host via a 1T SD card in my phone (encrypted). Why pull from/risk "the cloud" when I can have my stuff on me in the first place?
Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#22I 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,…
If this were to take off, I would expect to see some governments offering it to all citizens, both to support whatever digital services they provide, and as a tool for helping users manage their privacy.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#23Philosophically, and in the long-term, Solid is compelling to me for all of the reasons that the project purports to exist. But we have a classic chicken-and-egg problem with the absence of both reputable pod providers and the development of an application ecosystem.
Practically, and immediately, it is compelling to me as a developer of small-ish applications (plugins, etc.) in which I want to give users the ability to store some data (preferences, etc.) in the cloud without my having to manage that data, or the associated services/infrastructure - including having to deal with absorbing or recouping the cost.
Dropbox once offered the Datastore API[0], which was a handy little bring-your-own-database service allowing apps read/write access to a key/value store in a user's account (Dropbox accounts being quite common then), but it was deprecated[1] due to lack of traction at the time.
[0] https://dropbox.tech/developers/the-datastore-api-a-new-way-...
[1] https://dropbox.tech/developers/deprecating-the-sync-and-dat...
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#24Do pods support queries or just HTTP GET/POST/PUT/DELETE?
Queries are important for performance. They avoid transferring all data over the network from the pod to the application.
Although it's possible to define an open index format (metadata built from the actual data), it's probably still less efficient to access and also tricky to update without race conditions, data corruption, etc.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#25Every now and then this gets shared again and every time I am struck by what a terrible job the front page does of explaining what Solid is and why anyone would want to use it. Like, okay, yeah, "control my own data" is a nice pitch in this day and age I guess, but... what can I do with it? "Any kind of data can be stored in a Solid pod, including normal files like you might store in Google Drive or Dropbox" - that sounds kinda useful, where's the link to SolidFile? Is there even a SolidFile app or is that just a thing someone could make with this protocol?
Hell, where's the front page link to check out the list of any apps using Solid? It's like two or three random clicks to find this page (https://solidproject.org/apps) if you are curious, and it's super uninspiring - why does one of the apps in the "Showcase" section at the top not even have a description?
Solid always just feels like a solution looking for a problem.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#26How would querying the data work? Will a pod provide querying capabilities as well? Example use case would be finding all pictures around a certain location. It "seems" unavoidable that certain data still has to be at a service
provider since they enrich the original data. How would that work?
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#27I self-host via a 1T SD card in my phone (encrypted). Why pull from/risk "the cloud" when I can have my stuff on me in the first place?
So if you lose your phone, you lose all your data? (asking in a genuine manner)
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#28I 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,…
If this were to take off, I would expect to see some governments offering it to all citizens, both to support whatever digital services they provide, and as a tool for helping users manage their privacy.
How would governments finance this? Developing these offerings with the quality of service of the GAFAM (which users take now for granted) costs a fortune (financed by advertising in practice as of today).
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#29I 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,…
If this were to take off, I would expect to see some governments offering it to all citizens, both to support whatever digital services they provide, and as a tool for helping users manage their privacy.
Such as that of Flanders, for example: https://inrupt.com/flanders-solid
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#30I'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…
>photo-library viewing layer instead of giving google photos or flickr access to the photos in my pod?
IMHO, privacy is the wrong tack for these arguments. The issue is that Flickr or Google Photos can shut down and/or raise prices while all your data is stuck there.