Do I understand this (https://solidproject.org/developers/tutorials/getting-starte...) correctly: you can only write Solid applications with frontend Javascript?
Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
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Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#32I 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.
Exactly what I want in my tech… gov control of my data, combined with gov-paced innovation…
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#33This project is doomed in isolation. It needs to be coupled with at least one major popular/killer service, and preferably more than that. Plus make that as easy as uploading data to “the cloud,” and as transparent, plus “free” to meaningfully compete.
Right now it just looks like technology in search of a problem.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#341) I am a big fan of the general philosophy of Solid. But as others have mentioned, I've found it extremely difficult to understand specifics of the proposal or to see concrete progress, based on publicly available resources.
The best place I've found is Ruben Verborgh's blog (he's a researcher who's affiliated with Solid). For example here's a nice post which goes into more detail on the ideas behind Solid:
https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-f...
2) In terms of applications, I'd personally like to see more of a focus on productivity applications, rather than so much focus on social media. Better interop between cloud SaaS apps would be valuable to businesses and professionals, and would sidestep many thorny challenges like decentralized moderation.
As a concrete starting point: what if I could store my Google Docs text files on my own storage layer, and edit them in realtime using a variety of editor apps? This would resemble my ability to edit a .txt file on my computer in vim or TextEdit, but would port that metaphor to the world of modern online collaboration.
Here's a short Twitter thread I wrote on this topic:
https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1355255162626068482
3) I'm very curious to see more incremental paths from the current web to a decentralized approach. For example, what if we could start annotating existing websites with private data and sharing those annotations P2P, rather than starting over from scratch?
I've explored this a bit with my Wildcard project, where users can store annotations in a "spreadsheet" that is linked to a web page:
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#35To me the whole pitch is a bit too nebulous and seemingly
inconsistent. What does it mean with "portable" and
"interoperable" data standards? Does that mean specific file
formats? Protocols? Apps?
What do they mean with "Linked Data"? What's novel about this, what makes it different from hyperlinks or shared Dropbox folders?
Why does it say pods are decentralized data stores, but then on the "about" page it tells me I have to host the pod on a server - how is that decentralized?
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#36Do I understand this ( https://solidproject.org/developers/tutorials/getting-starte... ) correctly: you can only write Solid applications with frontend Javascript?
No, you're looking at a Getting Started Page targeted at web developers, hence they use the tools they are familiar with. These tools take care of auth/data format and other glue code so you can get started easily... But because Solid is based on open standards, you could write a desktop app that makes HTTP requests using your language's clients without issues, but you'll have to write some boilerplate code yourself until there's frameworks in your language that handle that for you.
I believe working with Solid is mostly about working with HTTP and RDF... so, if you're into the JVM, try Apache Jena[0].
PHP? Try EasyRDF[1].
Python? rdflib[2]
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#37Reminds me of https://remotestorage.io/ which I have used in a (mostly personal) website. I like that I can provide a service as a static website, and users pay for, manage and have control over their own storage. One of the things that could help it bootstrap is that they also support client-side Google Drive and Dropbox shims, so users who want to use something else can, but most users will just use one or the other.
There are downsides though.
- The API may be less than ideal for some use cases. This can make a well-performing app hard. For example there is no relational-sql API.
- You can't migrate user's data. So if you make changes to the format you need to retain backwards compatibility "forever".
- If you want to provide "discovery" or cross-user features you will need to have your own storage anyways.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#38Is this related to Jaron Lanier's vision of union (in the labor sense) groups which sell to companies access to the group's anonymized data? In his model, one individual can belong to many groups and their information is like a share/stock they have in a pool of data with other people. They sell in a cooperative fashion to select companies, gaining power through anonymity and group bargaining power.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#39Every 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 s…
I'm in the early stages of bootstrapping a SaaS app that prioritizes security and privacy. For my business, this would be great: users are far more likely to trust an app if the app won't be storing any of the application data itself -- if they can choose their own data hosting provider.
Google Cloud Drive, Box, and others already allow this kind of model to an extent. Third-party apps can access and modify user data hosted there, although not through a standardized API.
Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
#40Every 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 s…
You're right. It is still not clear to me what/how this will be used (I think I have an idea but not sure; the front page should have made it quite clear).
It would have been great if they had described a target use-case right there on the front page.
The writeup seems to be targeting developers but it looks to me like the product is for the public (end-users). The site doesn't seem to have done a good enough job linking both of them.