14 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-decentralize the web

306 points by rapnie 8y ago

MaxBarraclough 8y ago
Clickbait title. Not surprising given the source, but I like to think Hacker News expects better than an "I Was Devastated" headline.
- musage 8y ago
  That's why there is a whole article linked to the headline. As for "clickbait", you'd have been to live under a rock to be confused as to what Berners-Lee might be devastated about. > For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted. How would you sum this up neatly?
loco5niner 8y ago
Clickbait title
princekolt 8y ago
Does anyone have some links on Solid that aren't media articles? I can't find anything, not even in Tim's homepage.
- madrox 8y ago
  Home page: https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/
  - gooseus 8y ago
    Here is the HN discussion from 2 years ago on Solid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764
  - westurner 8y ago
    Spec: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec Source: https://github.com/solid/solid https://github.com/solid/solid ... From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 ( https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 ) > ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting). > Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action. Mastodon has now supplanted GNU StatusNet.
  - indigodaddy 8y ago
    Firefox Focus giving https security warning and won't let me visit the site.
jorgec 8y ago
Clickbait
Animats 8y ago
Here's a somewhat related question on peer to peer systems. Is there peer to peer VoIP that works? Discovering the other end isn't a problem; this is chat for a game, so there's a way to tell the other end about IP addresses and such. The question is whether you can reliably set up a VoIP connection between N known endpoints, including proper echo suppression and conference bridging, without a central server. Are the issues of getting through firewalls with cooperation from both sides solved? Is there anything that works well enough that non-technical users can use it reliably?
- ralusek 8y ago
  Isn't that what WebRTC does?
  - JoshTriplett 8y ago
    Somewhat, but in practice, WebRTC punts half of the problem to the site's own code. That's why some sites using WebRTC work great almost everywhere, and others seem to work great as long as you're not on any kind of unusual connection/firewall/proxy.
    - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
      WebRTC behaves properly until you support multiple browsers. Then it becomes a nightmare to maintain.
  - karmakaze 8y ago
    WebRTC defines STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) and TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) for dealing with firewalls. The problem is that they're optional and not always implemented. Secondly TURN relays data using a central server so can add latency or hit bandwidth bottlenecks.
jonny_eh 8y ago
How does decentralizing things combat the scourge of misinformation and fake news? Wouldn't it exacerbate the issue? Not to sound like a hipster, but I feel like the internet went downhill when it went mainstream. That's when there was a huge incentive to take advantage of people, whether it's spam, scams, or propaganda campaigns. The centralized control of our data is a separate issue, no?
- bobajeff 8y ago
  If only there was some way we could control what information people were able to share. Then only the correct information would spread. /s
  - chc 8y ago
    Is there anything to this comment beyond hollow, off-target sarcasm? The comment you're responding to seems like a legitimate question: The OP describes his horror at the increasingly common manipulation and misinformation campaigns on the Web as being part of Berners-Lee's motivation, but this solution seems to make them easier if anything, and certainly doesn't appear to make them harder.
    - lovemenot 8y ago
      I took that comment to say that its parent was calling for the impossible. So not off-topic. For some people including your parent perhaps, it is axiomatic that free information implies an abundance of false information. The construction was a little strange. "If only..." usually references an existing technology ironically. In this case I think they are saying there will never be such a tech.
      - setr 8y ago
        The existing tech he's referring to is what we're approaching with the web as it is now (silos of centralized systems, in which information could be controlled), and the irony is that a large part of why decentralized systems (and tim's construction) are notable is to avoid such a scenario. They explicitly do not solve the problem of fake news, because they explicitly do not want to live in the world where fake news is a solved problem (because the issues that go with its solution are far worse than the problem of fake news). The problem is that it is possible to do, and the solution to it is not something we want in general, but we're heading towards it anyways, and TBL is trying to avoid that with his machinations, and the commenter is effectively asking "how does this solve a problem that would naturally be solved with a solution we really, really don't want, and TBL is going out of his way not to solve?".
na85 8y ago
Seems like a great idea that won't go anywhere. Consider: Solid has to fight the network effects and the marketing/lobbying budgets of all the major players including Google, Facebook, et al., all of whom have a vested financial interest in expanding their walled gardens, driving lock-in, and harvesting user data as insidiously as possible.
- kijiki 8y ago
  They're fighting a headwind, for sure, but if the argument you're making was absolutely true, we'd all be using AOL today.
greglindahl 8y ago
Amusingly, the Solid website's SSL cert isn't compatible with centos 7, either curl or Python. Which is kinda the state of web security in a nutshell, sometimes. I wanted to run my web metadata extractor on it, but there isn't any metadata there anyway. Which is kind of fun for a project about web metadata.
- extra88 8y ago
  I’m on mobile so I can’t fully inspect the cert but since it’s hosted at MIT, my guess is the Comodo-backed cert is though Internet2. The site maintainer probably neglected to include the intermediate cert which is fine for many browsers because they cache those but is a problem for some.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Yeah, I think Qualys is agreeing with you, they say the chain is incomplete: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu
- lsh 8y ago
  is your extractor open source? (if so, could I get a link?)
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    This: https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct does ld+json, microformats, microdata, rdf3a, and opengraph mostly by calling other packages.
    - lsh 8y ago
      thank you so much for the link. I feel if we could give users/devs/whoever an appreciation for the structured data (or lack thereof) in a page and it's benefits we might see a general improvement in usability and interoperability. One can dream.
mikedilger 8y ago
Can anyone explain how Solid https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/ compares to (or relates to) Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ ? They seem to have the same goals.
- Torgo 8y ago
  mastodon is only federated microblogging. The Solid webpage suggests address and contact management, file sharing, article publication and web annotation.
  - etherealG 8y ago
    The protocol underneath mastodon can do all that too. I’d like to see federation with existing decentralised protocols with similar intent.
lovemenot 8y ago
I notice there are semantic web / linked data / foaf folks on board. These were some of TimBL's past, largely failed attempts to redirect the web's future. Is there any published post-mortem on what went wrong before, and why it's different this time? Solid has exactly the right vision, but with the wrong architecture because it attempts to re-purpose those failed projects.
- olefoo 8y ago
  Semantic web technologies have had quite a bit of adoption, but it's all pretty niche. JSON-LD embedded in html is the current widely deployed iteration and were it not for googles love of structured data it would not be nearly as big. RDF shows up in graph databases a lot too.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I crawled one page of the top 15 million websites and 6 million of them had some kind of microformat thing on the front page, mostly opengraph (1/2) and twitter cards (1/4), but that's still something. And for those who are wondering why I think it's interesting to find Facebook opengraph and twitter cards markup, it's because you can use it for decentralized purposes.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  The semantic web hasn't "failed", it's still developing. Remember, it's not meant for human eyes (by and large) anyway. Semantic Web tech is enabling tech that end users may never even know exists.
- mehh 8y ago
  A good question! In a simple analogy its a bit like where neural networks were not very long ago, a nice idea with potential but wasn't quite there, many said it was a dead end. Some technology simply takes longer to mature, or is dependent on missing bits of the puzzle to emerge before they can be properly utilised. So what are these 'missing bits': 1. Ease of use, RDF, Semantics, description logic, OWL, Ontologies, Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies, Turtle (the supposed easy to read format), JSON-LD etc have a steep learning curve and no good non academic path to adoption. It takes a good amount of effort and time to see why this is useful. Its not the sort of tech a developer is going to have a crack at on his next project, and if they did they would fail and then reinforce the impression that it doesn't work. Even some of the fundamental principles are hard for many developers to get their head around, i.e. Closed World Assumption vs Open World Assumption (CWA is a problem I see so often by devs outside in general when dealing with data). 2. Tools, helps with the above, but also the options for a decent open source triple store that support the operations you need has been challenging. Then trying to run this operationally in the time of the Cloud is a ball ache most don't want. AWS Neptune possibly helps with this, otherwise I would recommend Blazegraph. Hmm and then there is creating a Ontology yourself, Protege which is mehh but free, or Topbraid which is expensive and meh! Programming language support, it is assumed you will do al your work in Java, if not good luck. Tools and libraries are not well maintained in general, large due to academic funded rounds of work, people move on, lots get abandoned. 3. Obvious gaps in the tech, for example one that SHACL has filled, also rules which arguably SWRL is filling, all a bit ad-hoc and takes years to get consensus, I'm sure there are others that I haven't hit and that in itself is a worry. 4. Understanding problems this tech is good for. Personally I think the Semantic Web, as described in general, isn't very practical and seems to mask what the tech is good for. Which again in my opinion is Enterprise Data Integration. Joining up lots of different data sources into something well defined (tends to be really poor semantics in traditional DBs), which is particularly a problem in conglomerates. Bringing together data from many places, and mapping them together means you don't need to go out and make everyone agree to your standard model. I'll now give some hand wavy ideas:) Its often said this is for machines to communicate and make decisions which is correct, not sure RDF on web page is particularly useful in this context, APIs are. So much labour goes into connecting one API to another API, there is no discovery or means of a machine understanding what the data comes in actually means, nor would it with the current approach to having a son blob, and a page of documentation that poorly describes it. I think there is a massive opportunity here, and if it is solved it would dramatically disrupt how backend engineering works.
shalabhc 8y ago
Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac#
- hinkley 8y ago
  There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. The closest analogs I know of are, ironically enough, tools for software developers. We can take this farther. There are a lot of people trying to raise the bar on development tools and at least some of us believe that people tend to do what they know. What is demonstrated for them. Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. There are several aspects of code comprehension that I think would be conducive to his designs. And monitors are getting wide enough now that we nearly have the space to do them.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    > There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. Go to Ted Nelson's Wikipedia page and mouse over the "Project Xanadu" link. > Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. The value of Wikipedia page previews has very little to do with the quality of the technology. The quality of the technology is perfectly adequate for at least one version of what Ted Nelson is describing. The value is determined by what those tooltips are legally allowed to link-- can they show all primary documents which anyone on HN can trivially discover and access in a digital format, or can they merely show other Wikipedia pages? As long as it is illegal to link at least primary documents that whose authorship was funded by public money (like everything on Scihub), it really doesn't matter what type of view or even doc format you have.
    - setr 8y ago
      that may not be entirely true; if you imagined a universe where xanadu exists, and was popular as a general tool, then you can envision that open-source primary documents would be preferred over closed, simply on the basis that you can actually consistently link to them (in the same fashion that, today, non-paywalled sites are naturally favored over paywall for sharing on HN). And if xanadu documents were more useful (because of their interlinking and history) than the close-able flat documents (or perhaps closed documents that only link to closed source), then naturally things would slowly trend towards open documents by default, as it becomes more difficult to constrain yourself to the closed-source world. The problem today might be then, that everyone already accepts that primary documents are likely to be sealed off, and there's no significant incentive otherwise. But if the idea of having a sufficiently useful document upgraded from a flat pdf to a historically-archiving xanadu document...
jadedhacker 8y ago
I had a few reactions to this concept. 1) The idea of a set of reusable APIs around data ownership could actually be the foundation of a new internet. If it becomes impossible to concentrate data, the system will be more resistant. 2) The appeal of the Internet lies in the services that are available to users. A decentralized system doesn't appeal to capitalism, value is best captured through centralization and intermediation. Capitalist enterprises produce the bulk of services at the moment. This is a major adoption hurdle. 3) Dr. Berners-Lee appears to be a (digital) anarchist at heart, and it's a painfully beautiful vision. 4) He is partnering with capitalists to try to achieve an anarchist vision. This is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is about competition for the working class (i.e. users), domination and centralization. 5) It sounds like what he wants is a more egalitarian and democratic system. He might want to talk to more radical political theorists (I assume he may have already in the decades he's been kicking around). I wish Dr. Berners-Lee the best. I hope Solid gets some adoption. I've heard some people are using Mastodon. Here's hoping it's a trend. Nonetheless, if enough people start migrating, the corporations will offer them something to come back. After all, they can afford to, tech profits in established companies are obscene.
- analognoise 8y ago
  "Capitalist enterprises produce the bulk of services at the moment." All. You meant all the goods AND services. Unless you count the kids living on a commune who sell berries at the farmers market.
  - lsh 8y ago
    Unless those kids are giving away those berries, I'm pretty sure they are participating in a capitalist economy too.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    It's not all, though it is the astounding majority. Non-profits are not capitalist though they can mimic them in internal structure and worker co-ops are a kind of market socialism as the workers own the means of production.
  - 8y ago
nimbius 8y ago
Does this solution entail DNS roots outside of ICANN's purvey? The United States regularly seizes private domains under abusive legislation similar like the DMCA. in many other cases such as Wikileaks, private corporations simply casually agree to the US Governments demand to rescind registration. https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks...
toasterlovin 8y ago
Media centralizes. This is fundamental. There are zero marginal costs, so media providers are incentivized to spend huge amounts of money to create the most compelling content so that they can dominate the contest for attention. This creates a system with winner take all dynamics. Then, once you have won, you are incentivized to spend your winning to ensure that you continue winning. One of the ways you do this is by buying smaller competitors. Hence centralization is fundamental.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Only when there’s a profit motive - which admittedly most do, although some are principled and independent.
  - golemotron 8y ago
    It's not just profit motive. Popularity Effects centralize systems too.
- ihm 8y ago
  Ban media organizations larger than some size (or some better proxy). Nothing is fundamental when you can control the rules.
  - Wohlf 8y ago
    Companies like Sinclair would probably love that, they can more easily control lots of small, key media companies.
b1daly 8y ago
It’s amazing to me that a huge component of the problems TBL and colleagues are trying to solve are not discussed in the article, or here: we exchange our data to access services that are valuable, and expensive to develop to maintain. Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.” Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero. This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to be found. It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from which they profit. While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern. I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Some of the most valuable data we have is our purchase history. That lets advertisers know what we buy. They can then target us better. ShopIn is working to decentralize buying personas and put users in the drivers seat of how companies can use that data. It’ll be interesting to see how it works.
- confounded 8y ago
  That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convincing one to me. This was zucc’s argument to Congress for extracting as much personal data as possible from people. Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs. I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.
chrisparton1991 8y ago
The only commits from Tim himself are some documentation and a typo fix: https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl The project doesn't look particularly active from a commit standpoint, though I can imagine a whole lot of non-implementation work has to be done. Best of luck to Tim and the Solid team!
XalvinX 8y ago
Yeah, but didn't Al Gore invent that?
- XalvinX 8y ago
  -4 for a little joke? what, am I back on fucking reddit? I figured "hackers" would appreciate what is, in essence hacker humor that any hacker or computer nerd worth his salt would get. Damn it is hard to find like-minded people on the Internets these days..used to be much easier back in the 1990s......
Angostura 8y ago
https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu - for anyone who wants to see the basics in more detail.
rasz 8y ago
Will he officially support EME DRM in this new platform? You know, for the good of the web, or something.

306 points by rapnie 8y ago

Clickbait title. Not surprising given the source, but I like to think Hacker News expects better than an "I Was Devastated" headline.

musage 8y ago
That's why there is a whole article linked to the headline. As for "clickbait", you'd have been to live under a rock to be confused as to what Berners-Lee might be devastated about. > For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted. How would you sum this up neatly?

loco5niner 8y ago

Clickbait title

princekolt 8y ago

Does anyone have some links on Solid that aren't media articles? I can't find anything, not even in Tim's homepage.

madrox 8y ago
Home page: https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/
- gooseus 8y ago
  Here is the HN discussion from 2 years ago on Solid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764
- westurner 8y ago
  Spec: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec https://github.com/solid/solid-spec Source: https://github.com/solid/solid https://github.com/solid/solid ... From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 ( https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 ) > ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting). > Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action. Mastodon has now supplanted GNU StatusNet.
- indigodaddy 8y ago
  Firefox Focus giving https security warning and won't let me visit the site.

jorgec 8y ago

Clickbait

Animats 8y ago

Here's a somewhat related question on peer to peer systems. Is there peer to peer VoIP that works? Discovering the other end isn't a problem; this is chat for a game, so there's a way to tell the other end about IP addresses and such. The question is whether you can reliably set up a VoIP connection between N known endpoints, including proper echo suppression and conference bridging, without a central server. Are the issues of getting through firewalls with cooperation from both sides solved? Is there anything that works well enough that non-technical users can use it reliably?

ralusek 8y ago
Isn't that what WebRTC does?
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Somewhat, but in practice, WebRTC punts half of the problem to the site's own code. That's why some sites using WebRTC work great almost everywhere, and others seem to work great as long as you're not on any kind of unusual connection/firewall/proxy.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    WebRTC behaves properly until you support multiple browsers. Then it becomes a nightmare to maintain.
- karmakaze 8y ago
  WebRTC defines STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) and TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) for dealing with firewalls. The problem is that they're optional and not always implemented. Secondly TURN relays data using a central server so can add latency or hit bandwidth bottlenecks.

jonny_eh 8y ago

How does decentralizing things combat the scourge of misinformation and fake news? Wouldn't it exacerbate the issue? Not to sound like a hipster, but I feel like the internet went downhill when it went mainstream. That's when there was a huge incentive to take advantage of people, whether it's spam, scams, or propaganda campaigns. The centralized control of our data is a separate issue, no?

bobajeff 8y ago
If only there was some way we could control what information people were able to share. Then only the correct information would spread. /s
- chc 8y ago
  Is there anything to this comment beyond hollow, off-target sarcasm? The comment you're responding to seems like a legitimate question: The OP describes his horror at the increasingly common manipulation and misinformation campaigns on the Web as being part of Berners-Lee's motivation, but this solution seems to make them easier if anything, and certainly doesn't appear to make them harder.
  - lovemenot 8y ago
    I took that comment to say that its parent was calling for the impossible. So not off-topic. For some people including your parent perhaps, it is axiomatic that free information implies an abundance of false information. The construction was a little strange. "If only..." usually references an existing technology ironically. In this case I think they are saying there will never be such a tech.
    - setr 8y ago
      The existing tech he's referring to is what we're approaching with the web as it is now (silos of centralized systems, in which information could be controlled), and the irony is that a large part of why decentralized systems (and tim's construction) are notable is to avoid such a scenario. They explicitly do not solve the problem of fake news, because they explicitly do not want to live in the world where fake news is a solved problem (because the issues that go with its solution are far worse than the problem of fake news). The problem is that it is possible to do, and the solution to it is not something we want in general, but we're heading towards it anyways, and TBL is trying to avoid that with his machinations, and the commenter is effectively asking "how does this solve a problem that would naturally be solved with a solution we really, really don't want, and TBL is going out of his way not to solve?".

na85 8y ago

Seems like a great idea that won't go anywhere. Consider: Solid has to fight the network effects and the marketing/lobbying budgets of all the major players including Google, Facebook, et al., all of whom have a vested financial interest in expanding their walled gardens, driving lock-in, and harvesting user data as insidiously as possible.

kijiki 8y ago
They're fighting a headwind, for sure, but if the argument you're making was absolutely true, we'd all be using AOL today.

greglindahl 8y ago

Amusingly, the Solid website's SSL cert isn't compatible with centos 7, either curl or Python. Which is kinda the state of web security in a nutshell, sometimes. I wanted to run my web metadata extractor on it, but there isn't any metadata there anyway. Which is kind of fun for a project about web metadata.

extra88 8y ago
I’m on mobile so I can’t fully inspect the cert but since it’s hosted at MIT, my guess is the Comodo-backed cert is though Internet2. The site maintainer probably neglected to include the intermediate cert which is fine for many browsers because they cache those but is a problem for some.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Yeah, I think Qualys is agreeing with you, they say the chain is incomplete: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu
lsh 8y ago
is your extractor open source? (if so, could I get a link?)
- greglindahl 8y ago
  This: https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct does ld+json, microformats, microdata, rdf3a, and opengraph mostly by calling other packages.
  - lsh 8y ago
    thank you so much for the link. I feel if we could give users/devs/whoever an appreciation for the structured data (or lack thereof) in a page and it's benefits we might see a general improvement in usability and interoperability. One can dream.

mikedilger 8y ago

Can anyone explain how Solid https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/ compares to (or relates to) Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ ? They seem to have the same goals.

Torgo 8y ago
mastodon is only federated microblogging. The Solid webpage suggests address and contact management, file sharing, article publication and web annotation.
- etherealG 8y ago
  The protocol underneath mastodon can do all that too. I’d like to see federation with existing decentralised protocols with similar intent.

lovemenot 8y ago

I notice there are semantic web / linked data / foaf folks on board. These were some of TimBL's past, largely failed attempts to redirect the web's future. Is there any published post-mortem on what went wrong before, and why it's different this time? Solid has exactly the right vision, but with the wrong architecture because it attempts to re-purpose those failed projects.

olefoo 8y ago
Semantic web technologies have had quite a bit of adoption, but it's all pretty niche. JSON-LD embedded in html is the current widely deployed iteration and were it not for googles love of structured data it would not be nearly as big. RDF shows up in graph databases a lot too.
greglindahl 8y ago
I crawled one page of the top 15 million websites and 6 million of them had some kind of microformat thing on the front page, mostly opengraph (1/2) and twitter cards (1/4), but that's still something. And for those who are wondering why I think it's interesting to find Facebook opengraph and twitter cards markup, it's because you can use it for decentralized purposes.
mindcrime 8y ago
The semantic web hasn't "failed", it's still developing. Remember, it's not meant for human eyes (by and large) anyway. Semantic Web tech is enabling tech that end users may never even know exists.
mehh 8y ago
A good question! In a simple analogy its a bit like where neural networks were not very long ago, a nice idea with potential but wasn't quite there, many said it was a dead end. Some technology simply takes longer to mature, or is dependent on missing bits of the puzzle to emerge before they can be properly utilised. So what are these 'missing bits': 1. Ease of use, RDF, Semantics, description logic, OWL, Ontologies, Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies, Turtle (the supposed easy to read format), JSON-LD etc have a steep learning curve and no good non academic path to adoption. It takes a good amount of effort and time to see why this is useful. Its not the sort of tech a developer is going to have a crack at on his next project, and if they did they would fail and then reinforce the impression that it doesn't work. Even some of the fundamental principles are hard for many developers to get their head around, i.e. Closed World Assumption vs Open World Assumption (CWA is a problem I see so often by devs outside in general when dealing with data). 2. Tools, helps with the above, but also the options for a decent open source triple store that support the operations you need has been challenging. Then trying to run this operationally in the time of the Cloud is a ball ache most don't want. AWS Neptune possibly helps with this, otherwise I would recommend Blazegraph. Hmm and then there is creating a Ontology yourself, Protege which is mehh but free, or Topbraid which is expensive and meh! Programming language support, it is assumed you will do al your work in Java, if not good luck. Tools and libraries are not well maintained in general, large due to academic funded rounds of work, people move on, lots get abandoned. 3. Obvious gaps in the tech, for example one that SHACL has filled, also rules which arguably SWRL is filling, all a bit ad-hoc and takes years to get consensus, I'm sure there are others that I haven't hit and that in itself is a worry. 4. Understanding problems this tech is good for. Personally I think the Semantic Web, as described in general, isn't very practical and seems to mask what the tech is good for. Which again in my opinion is Enterprise Data Integration. Joining up lots of different data sources into something well defined (tends to be really poor semantics in traditional DBs), which is particularly a problem in conglomerates. Bringing together data from many places, and mapping them together means you don't need to go out and make everyone agree to your standard model. I'll now give some hand wavy ideas:) Its often said this is for machines to communicate and make decisions which is correct, not sure RDF on web page is particularly useful in this context, APIs are. So much labour goes into connecting one API to another API, there is no discovery or means of a machine understanding what the data comes in actually means, nor would it with the current approach to having a son blob, and a page of documentation that poorly describes it. I think there is a massive opportunity here, and if it is solved it would dramatically disrupt how backend engineering works.

shalabhc 8y ago

Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac#

hinkley 8y ago
There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. The closest analogs I know of are, ironically enough, tools for software developers. We can take this farther. There are a lot of people trying to raise the bar on development tools and at least some of us believe that people tend to do what they know. What is demonstrated for them. Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. There are several aspects of code comprehension that I think would be conducive to his designs. And monitors are getting wide enough now that we nearly have the space to do them.
- jancsika 8y ago
  > There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. Go to Ted Nelson's Wikipedia page and mouse over the "Project Xanadu" link. > Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. The value of Wikipedia page previews has very little to do with the quality of the technology. The quality of the technology is perfectly adequate for at least one version of what Ted Nelson is describing. The value is determined by what those tooltips are legally allowed to link-- can they show all primary documents which anyone on HN can trivially discover and access in a digital format, or can they merely show other Wikipedia pages? As long as it is illegal to link at least primary documents that whose authorship was funded by public money (like everything on Scihub), it really doesn't matter what type of view or even doc format you have.
  - setr 8y ago
    that may not be entirely true; if you imagined a universe where xanadu exists, and was popular as a general tool, then you can envision that open-source primary documents would be preferred over closed, simply on the basis that you can actually consistently link to them (in the same fashion that, today, non-paywalled sites are naturally favored over paywall for sharing on HN). And if xanadu documents were more useful (because of their interlinking and history) than the close-able flat documents (or perhaps closed documents that only link to closed source), then naturally things would slowly trend towards open documents by default, as it becomes more difficult to constrain yourself to the closed-source world. The problem today might be then, that everyone already accepts that primary documents are likely to be sealed off, and there's no significant incentive otherwise. But if the idea of having a sufficiently useful document upgraded from a flat pdf to a historically-archiving xanadu document...

jadedhacker 8y ago

I had a few reactions to this concept. 1) The idea of a set of reusable APIs around data ownership could actually be the foundation of a new internet. If it becomes impossible to concentrate data, the system will be more resistant. 2) The appeal of the Internet lies in the services that are available to users. A decentralized system doesn't appeal to capitalism, value is best captured through centralization and intermediation. Capitalist enterprises produce the bulk of services at the moment. This is a major adoption hurdle. 3) Dr. Berners-Lee appears to be a (digital) anarchist at heart, and it's a painfully beautiful vision. 4) He is partnering with capitalists to try to achieve an anarchist vision. This is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is about competition for the working class (i.e. users), domination and centralization. 5) It sounds like what he wants is a more egalitarian and democratic system. He might want to talk to more radical political theorists (I assume he may have already in the decades he's been kicking around). I wish Dr. Berners-Lee the best. I hope Solid gets some adoption. I've heard some people are using Mastodon. Here's hoping it's a trend. Nonetheless, if enough people start migrating, the corporations will offer them something to come back. After all, they can afford to, tech profits in established companies are obscene.

analognoise 8y ago
"Capitalist enterprises produce the bulk of services at the moment." All. You meant all the goods AND services. Unless you count the kids living on a commune who sell berries at the farmers market.
- lsh 8y ago
  Unless those kids are giving away those berries, I'm pretty sure they are participating in a capitalist economy too.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  It's not all, though it is the astounding majority. Non-profits are not capitalist though they can mimic them in internal structure and worker co-ops are a kind of market socialism as the workers own the means of production.
- 8y ago

nimbius 8y ago

Does this solution entail DNS roots outside of ICANN's purvey? The United States regularly seizes private domains under abusive legislation similar like the DMCA. in many other cases such as Wikileaks, private corporations simply casually agree to the US Governments demand to rescind registration. https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks...

toasterlovin 8y ago

Media centralizes. This is fundamental. There are zero marginal costs, so media providers are incentivized to spend huge amounts of money to create the most compelling content so that they can dominate the contest for attention. This creates a system with winner take all dynamics. Then, once you have won, you are incentivized to spend your winning to ensure that you continue winning. One of the ways you do this is by buying smaller competitors. Hence centralization is fundamental.

Synaesthesia 8y ago
Only when there’s a profit motive - which admittedly most do, although some are principled and independent.
- golemotron 8y ago
  It's not just profit motive. Popularity Effects centralize systems too.
ihm 8y ago
Ban media organizations larger than some size (or some better proxy). Nothing is fundamental when you can control the rules.
- Wohlf 8y ago
  Companies like Sinclair would probably love that, they can more easily control lots of small, key media companies.

b1daly 8y ago

It’s amazing to me that a huge component of the problems TBL and colleagues are trying to solve are not discussed in the article, or here: we exchange our data to access services that are valuable, and expensive to develop to maintain. Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.” Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero. This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to be found. It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from which they profit. While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern. I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Some of the most valuable data we have is our purchase history. That lets advertisers know what we buy. They can then target us better. ShopIn is working to decentralize buying personas and put users in the drivers seat of how companies can use that data. It’ll be interesting to see how it works.
confounded 8y ago
That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convincing one to me. This was zucc’s argument to Congress for extracting as much personal data as possible from people. Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs. I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.

chrisparton1991 8y ago

The only commits from Tim himself are some documentation and a typo fix: https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl The project doesn't look particularly active from a commit standpoint, though I can imagine a whole lot of non-implementation work has to be done. Best of luck to Tim and the Solid team!

XalvinX 8y ago

Yeah, but didn't Al Gore invent that?

XalvinX 8y ago
-4 for a little joke? what, am I back on fucking reddit? I figured "hackers" would appreciate what is, in essence hacker humor that any hacker or computer nerd worth his salt would get. Damn it is hard to find like-minded people on the Internets these days..used to be much easier back in the 1990s......

Angostura 8y ago

https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu - for anyone who wants to see the basics in more detail.

rasz 8y ago

Will he officially support EME DRM in this new platform? You know, for the good of the web, or something.