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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

#111

Post by cimm »

wernst wrote: post #95
TimTheTinker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I found this months ago, lost my pinned tabs and spent _hours_ looking for this. This will teach me to not bookmark interesting stuff. Thank you!

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

#112

Post by rapnie »

tgragnato wrote: post #110
miguelrochefort wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are much simpler and productive approaches to solve the problem of data interoperability. Really? Which ones?

Set a standard. Working with RDF is computationally intensive. And writing UIs that fit to various ontologies is not solved. So everyone inevitably ends up writing applications to fit a particular ontology. Excluding theoretical quibbles, what changes? In practice, the particular ontology that your application supports is the standard.

> And writing UIs that fit to various ontologies is not solved.

Are you aware of any projects that try to solve this? Very interested.

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

#113

Post by tgragnato »

rapnie wrote: post #112
tgragnato wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Set a standard. Working with RDF is computationally intensive. And writing UIs that fit to various ontologies is not solved. So everyone inevitably ends up writing applications to fit a particular ontology. Excluding theoretical quibbles, what changes? In practice, the particular ontology that your application supports is the standard.

> And writing UIs that fit to various ontologies is not solved. Are you aware of any projects that try to solve this? Very interested.

The evaluation of SPARQL patterns is PSPACE-complete.

Which means that for trying to approach the problem of writing UIs (working on a realistic hardware) that adapt to different ontologies you need to restrict the set of possible solutions...

That is, to limit the number and place constraints on the ontologies you accept.

The ActivityPub ecosystem is a glaring example of this. ActivityPub defines a set of baseline requirements (and a basic ontology) that all implementations need to support.

Once you meet the baseline, you can use linked data tools to extend the standard. Applications that understand your extension will also interact with it in the UI, those that don't understand your extension usually just ignore it.

But you need to specify base requirements (set the baseline for an extensible standard)! You can't just throw totally random ontologies at devs, it won't work. I think this is the error Solid makes.

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

#114

Post by throwaway894345 »

er4hn wrote: post #43
gklitt wrote: 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://…

I think that with a problem statement of "I want to control my data and how third parties use my data" Solid makes a good deal of sense. Personal information should be owned by you and you should be able to take it from service to service as you see fit. The two problems that I find with Solid, based on my own limited understanding are as follows: (1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, yo…

With respect to (1), data is a liability (running afoul of GDPR, etc), so if someone else can manage the storage then that reduced my liability considerably. Facebook might decide that their incentive to track you around the web exceeds their incentive to avoid this liability (of the two are even mutually exclusive), but for many avoiding liability is a powerful incentive.

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

#115

Post by throwaway894345 »

er4hn wrote: post #60
khimaros wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another problem is that once data has been accessed, it can be stored and analyzed. maybe we need to play big tech's own game and apply ToS to any data we allow them to access?

When you put it that way it feels like Solid is a technical solution to a legislative issue.

Or perhaps a complement to a legislative issue. Solid could be an easy tool/set-of-practices that allows companies to abide by data privacy laws.

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

#116

Post by cxr »

walterbell wrote: post #106
cxr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> "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 Could you share some examples of such data, other than "news" feeds? FOAF, for example? http://www.foaf-project.org/

Inline annotations[1][2], personal patch queues, project notes, bookmarks, calendars, photo galleries, reading lists, media trackers[3], anything you might think of dumping into a Gist or other pastebin-style site, anything you might think of dumping into a hosted TiddlyWiki, and so on. I.e., most of the type of data that Solid pods are already meant to handle, really (except served statically, without the POLP-violating[4] architecture that exists in Solid's current design).

1. https://hypothes.is

2. https://www.w3.org/annotation/

3. https://noeldemartin.github.io/media-kraken/

4. https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower-2005-12-19.html

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

#117

Post by tasn »

wernst wrote: post #95
TimTheTinker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I'm the founder of Etebase, cool to see it mentioned it here!

If anyone has any questions, please let me know (email in profile). We will also be giving a talk about Etebase at FOSDEM this year if anyone is interested: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/etebase/

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

#118

Post by tasn »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #100
wernst wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This project might be worth a look: https://www.etebase.com/

This is fantastic . Thank you!

Thanks (I'm the founder of Etebase)!

Let me know if you have any questions, my email is tom @ the domain.

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

#119

Post by tasn »

hackpert wrote: post #54

Last month, I was working with some people on building a decentralized health data store for vaccine waitlists (a la Mailbox) and certificates and we were looking at Solid as one potential backbone. I really admire what they’re trying to do. However, as some other people have observed, their example applications are quite awful and not very useful(?) and they seem to be marketing it to end users, not developers. In m…

I'm the founder of Etebase[1] an open-source and end-to-end encrypted backend for building apps. The goal is to maintain privacy and security while still bringing users the benefits of a central storage. Unlike Solid it's already used in a few places, like GNOME, KDE and etc.

[1] https://www.etebase.com

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

#120

Post by tasn »

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…

You may also like Etebase (I created it), which is an open-source and end-to-end encrypted backend for apps. So it removes the extra layer (an additional provider) but still maintains the privacy and security benefits of self-hosting.
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