11 ms·

Solid – Re-decentralizing the web

224 points by Everhusk 9y ago

alnitak 9y ago
Where can one find a simple "Hello world" example of an app built upon Solid?
- alau1218 9y ago
  So this is like zero net?
- eorge_g 9y ago
  linked in the repo: https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-angular/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-angular/blob/master/...
  - 0x006A 9y ago
    WebID-TLS authentication failed. is all i get from https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/ https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/
  - alnitak 9y ago
    Thanks! I got a bit confused by the amount of content in the repo.
- thrushcross 9y ago
  Hi, you asked the following on an older thread "Do you happen to know any accredited university or institution that would do that? Maybe with some examinations?" You might be interested in Thomas Edison State University, which is an accredited, public university in Pennsylvania with a distance education focus that places on emphasis on giving credits for employment experience and credit by examination for degree completion purposes.
johnnydoebk 9y ago
There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to implement some elves fantasies. 1. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that? 2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model? 3. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs. 4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?
- mynewtb 9y ago
  The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.
  - tuxt 9y ago
    Someone has to pay the bill.
    - astrobe_ 9y ago
      We already do. The hard disks, the bandwidth, the electricity. Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn. [1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.
    - a3_nm 9y ago
jasode 9y ago
I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story. In any case, I'll state again that decentralization is really a "game-theory-economics" puzzle and not a "protocol" or "node software stack" problem. Most software projects and essays on this subject keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech. That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that framework won't be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook. In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology & software like the "fathers of Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the "software stack", think about the economics. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc. My theory on why those scientists don't put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology". As another example of how "protocols" & "specifications" don't really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc. The technical stuff. But there is nothing about how people pay for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the "economics" are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and not predict that centralized email like Gmail/Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior. (E.g. the word "spam" is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.) [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/intern... [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821
- EGreg 9y ago
  I am really on board with what you're saying. The economies and diseconomies of scale play a big role in this. The reason people build and join centralized social networks is that building decentralized networks is hard to get right. So you get stuck with "natural" monopolies for a time. You need to try to re-decentralize in every generation, however, as technology improves. There are more serious socioeconomic issues however: 1) Centralized organizations have better security. That's why gmail is more secure than a random host with squirrelmail. That's why AWS has better uptime than a small data center. That's also why people joined cities formed alliances to fight off the invading hordes. 2) Network effects. To leave a service for another competing one, you need to pull all your friends with you. That's a high barrier for most people, so you have lock-in. The key is not to compete head-on. 3) Interoperability. There is so much politics that it's hard to make something interoperable that doesn't get forked up the wazoo. I believe that, in the future, technological tools will lead the way, and protocols and regulation will follow. You see this with anything: Bitcoin IPFS Scuttlebutt And hopefully Qbix [1] I also hope that in the future we will have decentralized Power generation Wireless communications [1] https://qbix.com/Qbix/Platform https://qbix.com/Qbix/Platform
hasenj 9y ago
How about, instead of trying to come up with protocols, just make forums and blogging sure that are so good that people prefer them to other mediums like facebook/reddit/twitter? Make them available to install (like traditional forums) instead of a good service. And build into them methods for users to liberate their data and/cross-link their identities from one software to another?
- falcolas 9y ago
  Could take a step back down the technology chain and use email, newsgroups, and XMPP hidden behind a great GUI. Not very sexy, but it would be ridiculously decentralized. Throw in GPG for some behind-the-scenes encryption and authentication if you really want to knock it out of the park.
  - hdhzy 9y ago
    GPG would not guarantee Forward Secrecy. OMEMO [0] is better if XMPP would be considered. [0]: https://conversations.im/omemo/ https://conversations.im/omemo/
  - qznc 9y ago
    This all builds on the centralized DNS. I would not call that "ridiculously" decentralized. You can go further by p2p technology. Not that I believe that it would be a good idea.
- _jal 9y ago
  Well, at a first glance, this is mostly reusing existing protocols, so I'm not even sure where the complaint comes from. Second, protocols matter. A lot. They are the are the landscape on which we build our online cities, and just like cities, if you look carefully, you can see outlines where old old protocols used to be. Code is law, as a certain smart guy says. And even if you really don't care about all that and just want to see the next new shiny, it still matters. Some of us, for instance, think Twitter's problems stem directly from the fact that they wrote a business plan instead of an RFC. That is, the nature of the service would be much better-implemented as a federated messaging service owned by no one, more similar to email. Of course, nobody gets VC$ for writing RFCs.
alexforster 9y ago
I think WebDAV would be a much more natural fit for this problem. When people think WebDAV they usually think Microsoft, but it's actually a very mature, open HTTP extension standard. RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it's going to take a lot of work to get this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does- * Locking * Versioning * Expressive ACLs * Expressive search * Quotas * Simple distributed data structures Granted, some of those features use an equally arcane XML syntax, but at least there's already tooling.
- EGreg 9y ago
  From what I understand, Tim Berners-Lee is really passionate about RDF because it helps build an interoperable semantic web. Unlock the data, which makes sense. Also, these days LD-JSON exists and is totally compatible with RDF. And in fact Facebook's Open Graph and Google's schemas.org are RDF!
ThomPete 9y ago
The web already is decentralized. It's literally possible for anyone to create their own content, platform etc. It seems to me that these re-decentralizing attempts are really just marketing in open-source wolf-clothes. Furthermore you don't re-decentralize the web my making a tool whos value proposition is just that. Create something which has value, which people want to use instead of something else. Thats decentralization in reality.
- sharun 9y ago
  People have been conditioned now for a decade to attach value to their like/retweet/view/karma counts. It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification high that everyone is addicted too. It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it. Most that get proposed don't.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    That's because the current "social" web is really about announcements and talking at crowds. Real social activities are decentralized local things like: * Going to dinner * Taking a trip together * Chipping in for a gift * Attending an event * Dating * Interacting with one another * Forums and communities * Group driving * Meetups * Volunteering in community * Helping after a disaster * Buying and selling furniture That's the stuff you don't need global singletons for. You don't need your signal to go to facebook or even AT&T to invite friends for dinner. Centralized social networks and governments cause perverse feelings in local communities where eg democrats and republicans living next to each other increasingly hate each other. I talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
    - eximius 9y ago
      Even 'real' social activities are increasingly reliant on multinationals that economically dominate their spaces. You don't HAVE to use them, but it is rarer and rarer to not roll up to a multinational. That is still a form of centralization.
mark_l_watson 9y ago
I enjoyed hearing about Solid and other "de-centralizing technologies" at the Decentralized Web Conference last June in SF. That said, I think that there is a less elegant but far simpler approach that I use: I write articles for my own blog and often I decide to license my books using a Creative Commons license. I then use traditional social media (Gnu Social, FB, Twitter, G+) to link to my own content. It bothers me (a little) when I see people putting a large amount of effort into generating content for platforms they don't own. I personally think that social media is OK for posting vacation pictures and simple stuff, but for anything you work hard on, why not have your own content on your own domain?
- chubot 9y ago
  I run my own blog and link to it with Twitter too. Why don't more people do it? It's more work to do so. Medium, Facebook, etc. actually do a fair amount of work for you, for better or worse. That is, they do provide value in exchange for what you give up. I see two kinds of people for which it make sense economically to own their own site: (1) Technical people like programmers. Because of their skills, the cost to owning a site is low. (2) Business owners. They can afford to pay a high price because it contributes to the business. That said, many small businesses choose to use Facebook or Squarespace as their presence. I guess with Squarespace you own the domain (?), but migrating out is still a pain. That probably accounts for 5% of people with a web presence... for the other 95%, getting the tools for free is apparently more important than owning the site.
- CephalopodMD 9y ago
  because it costs money
jancsika 9y ago
> Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Try to imagine a set of proposed conventions and tools for building decentralized (or distributed) digital cryptocurrencies written before the Bitcoin whitepaper. All the hard problems-- consensus, reducing trust in third parties, defending against Sybil, etc.-- are outside of the scope of this proposal. What are the chances that such a proposal would be not only relevant but also significantly improve the design of future distributed cryptocurrencies? This is relevant because many of the same hard problems are still outstanding when it comes to building secure social applications where the user has some semblance of control over their data.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
peterwwillis 9y ago
At first I thought this was just reinventing the wheel, but now I realize what they're really doing: taking what was formally an incompatible, proprietary set of enterprise solutions and turning it into a set of standards that can sit on top of any platform. The big win is actually cross-platform compatibility for user, system & network management protocols. I don't think the goals they want to achieve matter to users, and are antithetical to corporate interests. But it'll be neat to have these protocols work with so many existing systems. This is going to be a fucking security nightmare, though.
m-j-fox 9y ago
Sell this to me as a user.
- stonogo 9y ago
  No. Selling is what got us into this mess.
  - laughingman2 9y ago
    Exactly. People harping that this is not "commercializable" miss the point that selling out of the web is the very thing this fights against. The creators of personal computing and internet like Licklider were idealists who envisoned the computer being a tool to expand human intellect. >“In a few years humans will be able to think as no humans have thought before” See the scope of their thinking and that of sellouts who want to commercialize personal data to squeeze dollars. The crass selling out of the ideals by the later "entrepreneurs" who claim to make the world better but have no such ideals other than profits has resulted in complete mess.
dang 9y ago
Related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090.
woodandsteel 9y ago
The web decentralization movement hasn't gotten very far as far as adoption goes. But that is because it is pretty new and the technology is still being worked out. There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. What I am hoping is that once the tech gets solid, one or more people who are good at thinking about ordinary users will come up with some ways to win them over. My own thought is to figure out what it is that people value that centralized services, by their very nature, cannot provide, but that decentralized services can. Along these lines, maybe what will happen is Facebook will get hacked, millions of people will suffer as a consequence, and then people will be in a frame of mind to listen to arguments for decentralization.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I think the key point is that open/decentralized services need to be better than the closed ones. One of the big things here is that decentralized services rarely have to make compromises for the sake of profit. As ads get more and more irritating, for example, ad-free products are more appealing.
- verisimilidude 9y ago
  > There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. I imagine decentralized tech would creep into everyone's lives by accident, service by service, rather than happening all at once. I don't think people care (yet) about how their bits are pushed around, but they'll jump into a decentralized service if needed to keep up with the latest craze.
- Everhusk 9y ago
  Or perhaps Facebook will decide to adopt the Solid protocol, which would imho be the single greatest thing Zuckerberg could do. Even better than donating all of his money.
woodandsteel 9y ago
Anybody know how this relates to ipfs? Is it an alternative, or something that could be built on top of ipfs, or what?
grizzles 9y ago
I guess everyone has their own take on how to do this. (Here's mine: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecomment-280750050 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecommen...) What's missing from many of these projects is the ability to remix / mashup people's peice of this goal. Imo, these efforts often seem to attract grand visions instead of utilitarians. I talked to one guy and he was pretty hostile about me using his open source code in a way he didn't approve.
- pekk 9y ago
  You may be excited about your project, but this really isn't doing the same thing as SOLID at all. "within a few months I'll release an open source ML powered browser that speeds up their web browsing experience by something between 10X-100X" sounds more grand than utilitarian to me. Nobody has to change their code to support whatever odd thing you want to do with it, or even to think that what you want to do is worthwhile. It's open source, change it yourself. Or don't, but remember that other people have the right to say "no, I'm not doing that."
  - grizzles 9y ago
    If you load stuff from disk vs the web, I'm pretty sure those numbers bear out. BTW I was happy to write the code, but he wasn't happy to take the pull request. That's fair enough but it changed my calculations on where to spend my hobby time so I wrote my own version of his code.
acd 9y ago
I view a centralised web as a similar to à biological system of clones. A few large cloud actors are running similar systems that are essentially copy pasted blueprints. Such a system in the analogy of an biological immune system is vulnerable to diseases. A decentralized web is more resilient because each node is slightly different. "Monocrop agricultural systems provide an ideal environment for pathogen evolution, because they offer a high density of target specimens with similar/identical genotype" source: Wikipedia
vkorsunov 9y ago
We developing https://bubblehunt.com https://bubblehunt.com - it's search platform, where every user can create own search system without coding. And main idea - web decentralization, you can get information by users, where every become independent information provider, like miniGoogle. Maybe you can give us advice, how we can using Solid on our platform?
skdotdan 9y ago
Rule of thumb: if you want people to do X, make people to have economic incentives to do so. If you want to make the web decentralized again, then think about how would you pitch it to consumers and companies, no tech guys like us.

224 points by Everhusk 9y ago

alnitak 9y ago

Where can one find a simple "Hello world" example of an app built upon Solid?

alau1218 9y ago
So this is like zero net?
eorge_g 9y ago
linked in the repo: https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-angular/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-angular/blob/master/...
- 0x006A 9y ago
  WebID-TLS authentication failed. is all i get from https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/ https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/
- alnitak 9y ago
  Thanks! I got a bit confused by the amount of content in the repo.
thrushcross 9y ago
Hi, you asked the following on an older thread "Do you happen to know any accredited university or institution that would do that? Maybe with some examinations?" You might be interested in Thomas Edison State University, which is an accredited, public university in Pennsylvania with a distance education focus that places on emphasis on giving credits for employment experience and credit by examination for degree completion purposes.

johnnydoebk 9y ago

There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to implement some elves fantasies. 1. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that? 2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model? 3. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs. 4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?

mynewtb 9y ago
The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.
- tuxt 9y ago
  Someone has to pay the bill.
  - astrobe_ 9y ago
    We already do. The hard disks, the bandwidth, the electricity. Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn. [1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.
  - a3_nm 9y ago

jasode 9y ago

I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story. In any case, I'll state again that decentralization is really a "game-theory-economics" puzzle and not a "protocol" or "node software stack" problem. Most software projects and essays on this subject keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech. That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that framework won't be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook. In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology & software like the "fathers of Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the "software stack", think about the economics. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc. My theory on why those scientists don't put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology". As another example of how "protocols" & "specifications" don't really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc. The technical stuff. But there is nothing about how people pay for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the "economics" are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and not predict that centralized email like Gmail/Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior. (E.g. the word "spam" is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.) [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/intern... [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821

EGreg 9y ago
I am really on board with what you're saying. The economies and diseconomies of scale play a big role in this. The reason people build and join centralized social networks is that building decentralized networks is hard to get right. So you get stuck with "natural" monopolies for a time. You need to try to re-decentralize in every generation, however, as technology improves. There are more serious socioeconomic issues however: 1) Centralized organizations have better security. That's why gmail is more secure than a random host with squirrelmail. That's why AWS has better uptime than a small data center. That's also why people joined cities formed alliances to fight off the invading hordes. 2) Network effects. To leave a service for another competing one, you need to pull all your friends with you. That's a high barrier for most people, so you have lock-in. The key is not to compete head-on. 3) Interoperability. There is so much politics that it's hard to make something interoperable that doesn't get forked up the wazoo. I believe that, in the future, technological tools will lead the way, and protocols and regulation will follow. You see this with anything: Bitcoin IPFS Scuttlebutt And hopefully Qbix [1] I also hope that in the future we will have decentralized Power generation Wireless communications [1] https://qbix.com/Qbix/Platform https://qbix.com/Qbix/Platform

hasenj 9y ago

How about, instead of trying to come up with protocols, just make forums and blogging sure that are so good that people prefer them to other mediums like facebook/reddit/twitter? Make them available to install (like traditional forums) instead of a good service. And build into them methods for users to liberate their data and/cross-link their identities from one software to another?

falcolas 9y ago
Could take a step back down the technology chain and use email, newsgroups, and XMPP hidden behind a great GUI. Not very sexy, but it would be ridiculously decentralized. Throw in GPG for some behind-the-scenes encryption and authentication if you really want to knock it out of the park.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  GPG would not guarantee Forward Secrecy. OMEMO [0] is better if XMPP would be considered. [0]: https://conversations.im/omemo/ https://conversations.im/omemo/
- qznc 9y ago
  This all builds on the centralized DNS. I would not call that "ridiculously" decentralized. You can go further by p2p technology. Not that I believe that it would be a good idea.
_jal 9y ago
Well, at a first glance, this is mostly reusing existing protocols, so I'm not even sure where the complaint comes from. Second, protocols matter. A lot. They are the are the landscape on which we build our online cities, and just like cities, if you look carefully, you can see outlines where old old protocols used to be. Code is law, as a certain smart guy says. And even if you really don't care about all that and just want to see the next new shiny, it still matters. Some of us, for instance, think Twitter's problems stem directly from the fact that they wrote a business plan instead of an RFC. That is, the nature of the service would be much better-implemented as a federated messaging service owned by no one, more similar to email. Of course, nobody gets VC$ for writing RFCs.

alexforster 9y ago

I think WebDAV would be a much more natural fit for this problem. When people think WebDAV they usually think Microsoft, but it's actually a very mature, open HTTP extension standard. RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it's going to take a lot of work to get this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does- * Locking * Versioning * Expressive ACLs * Expressive search * Quotas * Simple distributed data structures Granted, some of those features use an equally arcane XML syntax, but at least there's already tooling.

EGreg 9y ago
From what I understand, Tim Berners-Lee is really passionate about RDF because it helps build an interoperable semantic web. Unlock the data, which makes sense. Also, these days LD-JSON exists and is totally compatible with RDF. And in fact Facebook's Open Graph and Google's schemas.org are RDF!

ThomPete 9y ago

The web already is decentralized. It's literally possible for anyone to create their own content, platform etc. It seems to me that these re-decentralizing attempts are really just marketing in open-source wolf-clothes. Furthermore you don't re-decentralize the web my making a tool whos value proposition is just that. Create something which has value, which people want to use instead of something else. Thats decentralization in reality.

sharun 9y ago
People have been conditioned now for a decade to attach value to their like/retweet/view/karma counts. It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification high that everyone is addicted too. It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it. Most that get proposed don't.
- EGreg 9y ago
  That's because the current "social" web is really about announcements and talking at crowds. Real social activities are decentralized local things like: * Going to dinner * Taking a trip together * Chipping in for a gift * Attending an event * Dating * Interacting with one another * Forums and communities * Group driving * Meetups * Volunteering in community * Helping after a disaster * Buying and selling furniture That's the stuff you don't need global singletons for. You don't need your signal to go to facebook or even AT&T to invite friends for dinner. Centralized social networks and governments cause perverse feelings in local communities where eg democrats and republicans living next to each other increasingly hate each other. I talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
  - eximius 9y ago
    Even 'real' social activities are increasingly reliant on multinationals that economically dominate their spaces. You don't HAVE to use them, but it is rarer and rarer to not roll up to a multinational. That is still a form of centralization.

mark_l_watson 9y ago

I enjoyed hearing about Solid and other "de-centralizing technologies" at the Decentralized Web Conference last June in SF. That said, I think that there is a less elegant but far simpler approach that I use: I write articles for my own blog and often I decide to license my books using a Creative Commons license. I then use traditional social media (Gnu Social, FB, Twitter, G+) to link to my own content. It bothers me (a little) when I see people putting a large amount of effort into generating content for platforms they don't own. I personally think that social media is OK for posting vacation pictures and simple stuff, but for anything you work hard on, why not have your own content on your own domain?

chubot 9y ago
I run my own blog and link to it with Twitter too. Why don't more people do it? It's more work to do so. Medium, Facebook, etc. actually do a fair amount of work for you, for better or worse. That is, they do provide value in exchange for what you give up. I see two kinds of people for which it make sense economically to own their own site: (1) Technical people like programmers. Because of their skills, the cost to owning a site is low. (2) Business owners. They can afford to pay a high price because it contributes to the business. That said, many small businesses choose to use Facebook or Squarespace as their presence. I guess with Squarespace you own the domain (?), but migrating out is still a pain. That probably accounts for 5% of people with a web presence... for the other 95%, getting the tools for free is apparently more important than owning the site.
CephalopodMD 9y ago
because it costs money

jancsika 9y ago

> Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Try to imagine a set of proposed conventions and tools for building decentralized (or distributed) digital cryptocurrencies written before the Bitcoin whitepaper. All the hard problems-- consensus, reducing trust in third parties, defending against Sybil, etc.-- are outside of the scope of this proposal. What are the chances that such a proposal would be not only relevant but also significantly improve the design of future distributed cryptocurrencies? This is relevant because many of the same hard problems are still outstanding when it comes to building secure social applications where the user has some semblance of control over their data.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

peterwwillis 9y ago

At first I thought this was just reinventing the wheel, but now I realize what they're really doing: taking what was formally an incompatible, proprietary set of enterprise solutions and turning it into a set of standards that can sit on top of any platform. The big win is actually cross-platform compatibility for user, system & network management protocols. I don't think the goals they want to achieve matter to users, and are antithetical to corporate interests. But it'll be neat to have these protocols work with so many existing systems. This is going to be a fucking security nightmare, though.

m-j-fox 9y ago

Sell this to me as a user.

stonogo 9y ago
No. Selling is what got us into this mess.
- laughingman2 9y ago
  Exactly. People harping that this is not "commercializable" miss the point that selling out of the web is the very thing this fights against. The creators of personal computing and internet like Licklider were idealists who envisoned the computer being a tool to expand human intellect. >“In a few years humans will be able to think as no humans have thought before” See the scope of their thinking and that of sellouts who want to commercialize personal data to squeeze dollars. The crass selling out of the ideals by the later "entrepreneurs" who claim to make the world better but have no such ideals other than profits has resulted in complete mess.

dang 9y ago

Related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090.

woodandsteel 9y ago

The web decentralization movement hasn't gotten very far as far as adoption goes. But that is because it is pretty new and the technology is still being worked out. There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. What I am hoping is that once the tech gets solid, one or more people who are good at thinking about ordinary users will come up with some ways to win them over. My own thought is to figure out what it is that people value that centralized services, by their very nature, cannot provide, but that decentralized services can. Along these lines, maybe what will happen is Facebook will get hacked, millions of people will suffer as a consequence, and then people will be in a frame of mind to listen to arguments for decentralization.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I think the key point is that open/decentralized services need to be better than the closed ones. One of the big things here is that decentralized services rarely have to make compromises for the sake of profit. As ads get more and more irritating, for example, ad-free products are more appealing.
verisimilidude 9y ago
> There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to decentralized ones. I imagine decentralized tech would creep into everyone's lives by accident, service by service, rather than happening all at once. I don't think people care (yet) about how their bits are pushed around, but they'll jump into a decentralized service if needed to keep up with the latest craze.
Everhusk 9y ago
Or perhaps Facebook will decide to adopt the Solid protocol, which would imho be the single greatest thing Zuckerberg could do. Even better than donating all of his money.

woodandsteel 9y ago

Anybody know how this relates to ipfs? Is it an alternative, or something that could be built on top of ipfs, or what?

grizzles 9y ago

I guess everyone has their own take on how to do this. (Here's mine: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecomment-280750050 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecommen...) What's missing from many of these projects is the ability to remix / mashup people's peice of this goal. Imo, these efforts often seem to attract grand visions instead of utilitarians. I talked to one guy and he was pretty hostile about me using his open source code in a way he didn't approve.

pekk 9y ago
You may be excited about your project, but this really isn't doing the same thing as SOLID at all. "within a few months I'll release an open source ML powered browser that speeds up their web browsing experience by something between 10X-100X" sounds more grand than utilitarian to me. Nobody has to change their code to support whatever odd thing you want to do with it, or even to think that what you want to do is worthwhile. It's open source, change it yourself. Or don't, but remember that other people have the right to say "no, I'm not doing that."
- grizzles 9y ago
  If you load stuff from disk vs the web, I'm pretty sure those numbers bear out. BTW I was happy to write the code, but he wasn't happy to take the pull request. That's fair enough but it changed my calculations on where to spend my hobby time so I wrote my own version of his code.

acd 9y ago

I view a centralised web as a similar to à biological system of clones. A few large cloud actors are running similar systems that are essentially copy pasted blueprints. Such a system in the analogy of an biological immune system is vulnerable to diseases. A decentralized web is more resilient because each node is slightly different. "Monocrop agricultural systems provide an ideal environment for pathogen evolution, because they offer a high density of target specimens with similar/identical genotype" source: Wikipedia

vkorsunov 9y ago

We developing https://bubblehunt.com https://bubblehunt.com - it's search platform, where every user can create own search system without coding. And main idea - web decentralization, you can get information by users, where every become independent information provider, like miniGoogle. Maybe you can give us advice, how we can using Solid on our platform?

skdotdan 9y ago

Rule of thumb: if you want people to do X, make people to have economic incentives to do so. If you want to make the web decentralized again, then think about how would you pitch it to consumers and companies, no tech guys like us.