91–100 of 126 posts
What Solid really needs to do is create a page that I could show to my nontechnical friends where it explains how it works and what services/sites support it. Without those two things being front and center, I can't see Solid being anything more than a niche interest for technical folks.
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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?
This 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.
This is a common turn of phrase (which has turned up more than once here, even), but it's not appropriate to describe Solid. Solid is a half-implemented solution to a real problem.
Love the idea but how does Solid prevent any malicious actor from over time replicating all the data that user authorize into a centralized repository - in this case, it only makes it even easier for data consolidation.
In my (personal) view, Solid is technology that enables service providers to put you in control of the data, not that forces them to do so. In other words, it's just part of the puzzle, where the other part is e.g. customer demand or regulation.
Every 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 dat…
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…
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…
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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.
Really? Which ones?
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 pre…
User profiles as well, à la gravatar.
How about work history, LinkedIn exports, standard resume formats?
A lot could be done with medical data, using FHIR's ontologies.
Fitness data also deserves a place there.
It's difficult to understand how Solid isn't a major success after all these years.
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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…
"The people who collaborated with the Germans had their reasons. Me, I was not alive during that time."
I don’t trust GAFAM to protect my privacy, but I wouldn’t trust this government either.
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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 dat…
This project might be worth a look: https://www.etebase.com/