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Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

solid.inrupt.com

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Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#191

Post by kjetilk »

Animats wrote: post #93

Who's "Inrupt"? The main Solid site is https://solid.mit.edu/" . Inrupt is not in Crunchbase. They don't have a business address on their site. They try to get people to sign up without giving terms and conditions first. And they want you to give them access to all your personal information. Right.

So, we're kinda dogfooding that, we're not only building decentralized social networks, the business is also decentralized, so we haven't got any big corporate offices. A lot happens out of Boston, but I'm based near Oslo, Norway, we have people in Belgium, Czechia, France, Costa Rica, etc. Nevertheless, you're right, we're a responsible business, and we should identify with a business address.

And we definitely need a ToS and a privacy policy, etc. The explanation for why we didn't have that is that the code running the sites that we put out there for people to try out is the same code you'd use for your POD on your own box. And most of us are running that code on our own boxes (mine is in a server rack in my basement :-) ), and those installs don't need a ToS. :-) So, you're right, we should have that as an option, so I filed a bug for it: https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server/issues/799

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#192

Post by IshKebab »

azeirah wrote: post #182
dgudkov wrote: post #14

I like the idea. It's basically an encapsulated portable personal "wiki" for a user (persona) with an open data model that can be accessed by external apps based on permissions. What it doesn't solve is the problem how this data is going to be used by those who access it. I wish there was some kind of digital contracts that only allow using personal data in a way permitted by the user.

Have you heard of the concept of "homomorphic encryption"? It allows someone to perform computations on encrypted pieces of data, without actually ever having access to the raw data itself. I have no idea how realistic or how "possible" this technology is for in the near future, but this seems to be a great match for technologies like these.

The answer is not at all realistic or possible. Homomorphic crypto is a mathematical curiosity, not something that is any actual use currently.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#194

Post by krapp »

CM30 wrote: post #120
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose. But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The and tags and now defunct concepts like VR…

I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites. Even today the slower and more thoughtful pace of a traditional forum is more conductive to decent discussions than the obsessively upvote/view focused world of social media sites.

>I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites.

Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.

I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#195

Post by kjetilk »

gfodor wrote: post #88
nulbyte wrote: post #87

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…

AFAICT there are literally no apps to try this on. Why did they decide to announce this and publicize it before a basic, well-polished, example was ready? The pod signup process is using vanilla bootstrap, there wasn't even a visual design pass.

Well, I guess we just asked the opposite question: Is there any reason to keep this sub-surface any longer, and we didn't find any such reason... :-)

So, it is just "release early, release often". So, the code and the spec has been out there for a long time. I mean, some of this stuff is really old. Us geeks have been thinking about decentralized social networking since the dawn of ages, and it seems like the rest of the world is starting to wake up to its necessity too. So, I think the timing is pretty OK now.

Like, Linux didn't come with a well-polished example either... It wasn't even intended to out-do Minix. :-)

I guess you could say that we could say even more clearly that this is a prototype, and we have a roadmap where it will stay a prototype for some time. But we are seeing people finding it interesting that we're actually not trying to engineer something from the ground, we are seeing what kind of impact we can have with pretty well tested Web technologies. I suspect we have a lot less development to do to have a great social impact than you'd have to do if went full P2P.

At the same time, there is a large graveyard out there of failed decentralized social networks, so we are under no illusion that this is going to be easy. It is going to be pretty hard.

Still, I don't see any reason why we should be sub-surface any longer.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#196

Post by KirinDave »

nulbyte wrote: post #87

After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…

There was almost nothing on the WWW, gopherspace was still the big thingy, and many folks still had their email hand-delivered via UUCP.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#197

Post by ohiovr »

I don’t want anyone to be custodian of my data since a hard drive costs so little and my data is supposed to be so valuable. There is always an incentive to break in and steal it. or just use it in unscrupulous ways like tge multitrillion dollar grift system we call the tech industry does daily.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#198

Post by detritus »

usaphp wrote: post #190
detritus wrote: post #188

Well I feel like an idiot, I populated my 'pod' with a couple of personal details, and now have no idea how to undo what I've done* and haven't received a confirmatory email to my address so now have some 'thing' on public space I have no control over, no understanding of and no ability to delete. Not a great start. * Ostensibly I've over-written with nonsense details, but a cursory check in another browser, not sign…

Why do you populate your personal details in the “thing” you don’t understand and have no control over in the first place?

Yep, an entirely valid point and the reason I called myself an idiot - I used my real name and my email and I stupidly assumed I'd have some immediate control over public visibility, or at worst, the ability to undo what I'd entered or nix the thing entirely.

Given the sign-up asks for both details and I assumed there might be some potential for further use here for a platform created by a trusted party, I unthinkingly stumbled with the minimum.

I usually - which is to say always - don't, but here did.

Not looking for sympathy or sanctimony, just relaying my experience.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#199

Post by jv22222 »

The "Centralized to Decentralized Recursion" is a bit like Moore's Law.

It works for all aspects the digital ecosystem. Clients, Data, Bandwidth, Storage, etc.

Centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> etc.

Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

#200

Post by kjetilk »

dkoston wrote: post #62

What’s not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint. In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc In order to do that, there are a few hurdles: - You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone’s POD. - More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to…

Right, so that's one of the reasons why Solid is built on top of Linked Data and RDF, we need the power of these technologies to support those advanced use cases.

The Web Access Control spec is here: https://github.com/solid/web-access-control-spec . In principle, we could support really granular data ACLs based on that spec, the ACL applies to a URL, and you can give any datapoint a URL, so problem solved. In practice, it may become a bit cumbersome, I suppose it remains to be seen how you'd do it in practice, but I think we have a really good start there, there's lots of stuff that can be realized now.

There's a wealth of academic research that applies to these problems, the problem of the Semantic Web community has been that it has been strong on the academic stuff, but not very focused on truly useful stuff that can be done right now (to quote AaronSw). That's one of the things that Inrupt sets out to change. But the good thing is that we're not setting out to solve really hard problems in the dark, since we have that academic research, we know pretty well what's hard and what should be within reach.

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