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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

#81
post #36
post #31

Do 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…

> Solid is mostly about working with HTTP and RDF

Surely this incarnation of the RDF-based Semantic Web nirvana will succeed where all other attempts have failed! :)

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

#82

How does this work in practice, I didn't see a worked example on the site. For instance, say I give Solid Social access to my contacts and my photos. At that point, Solid Social can access all my contacts and photos, copy them, and then do whatever they please with them (even if I later revoke permissions). In the current web, I upload my photos to a website, which I then trust not to use them inappropriately. In the…

Solid is just the technical part. You're also going to need the regulatory part that says it's illegal for a company stores data after you revoke access. But the technical part is still necessary.

How is this really any fundamentally different from say GDPR then?

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solid is just the technical part. You're also going to need the regulatory part that says it's illegal for a company stores data after you revoke access. But the technical part is still necessary.

How is this really any fundamentally different from say GDPR then?

Because Solid is a completely different model for where the data is stored. It decouples the apps from the storage.

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

#84

Is 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.

Parent seems to be referring to MIDs [1]

"Mediators of Individual Data (MIDs) are a union-like organization championed by technologist Jaron Lanier as a framework for addressing the key issues around user-generated data like ownership, monetization, and reparations. An effective MID or data union could perform a number of critical functions on behalf of its members that are currently lacking in the digital economy."

There exists also a great Harvard Business Review article, but it is paywalled.

[1] https://blog.datadividendproject.com/this-week-in-data-101-w...

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

#85
post #34

1) 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://…

We are launching both a Solid server TrinPod and a suite of productivity apps with TrinApp launchpad - free versions will be available end of the month https://graphmetrix.com

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

#87
post #36
post #31

Do 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…

Asking devs to work with RDF is the main issue I have with the approach of Solid.

I don't expect SPARQL and ontologies to go mainstream. So why "force your hand" and make solid depend on the standards of the semantic web?

There are much simpler and productive approaches to solve the problem of data interoperability.

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

#88

Solid is awesome and I'm bullish on this model in the long-run, but it seems to be caught in a classic chicken/egg problem. Nobody is going to use it until there are good apps. and nobody is going to make good apps until there is a market of users. IMO this is the same problem that kept Sandstorm and remoteStorage from getting big. I see 2 solutions currently: 1. Make an awesome storage product, that just happens to…

> It might have to start out also implementing S3, which unfortunately doesn't support OAuth

The expectation that Solid is backed by a smart server that's intimately aware that it's hosting a Solid pod and what exactly it takes to do so is a critical failure in Solid's design. If Solid's protocols instead better accommodated "dead" formats that can be served by static web hosts, so your $USERNAME.github.io could be the front door to your data store—at least the parts of it that you already make available to the public, anyway—then we'd have passed the chicken-and-egg stage years ago and Solid would already be a runaway success.

At the end of the day, it's supposed to be about data, after all—linked data—and not about the endpoints/servers themselves. Compare to the ease of creating an RSS feed for your blog (you can get your static site generator to spit one out pretty easily) and contrast it to needing to provision and actively administer a Mastodon server, for example.

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

#89
This is probably a lie just like our media is a lie... did you know that robinhood was supposed to raise 6 billion but only raised 1 billion according to nytimes. They probably deleted the article so in case they get screwed. I hope robinhood and citadel get screwed over and fail. Karmas a bitch ain’t it?

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

#90
post #23

Philosophically, 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…

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