17 ms·

Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

• yarapavan 8y ago
  His blog post announcing solid - https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085 https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-we...
  • detaro 8y ago
    One would think that after a few years of working on this he'd have built a place to post content using it. EDIT: at least there's the original outside medium on their project page, but seems like just a static squarespace page: https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  I don't quite understand "how". It all sounds magical.
  • blincoln 8y ago
    I could be wrong, because I'm also a little bemused by the lack of specifics on the site, but it sounds like the Pod stores sort of "quanta of shareable information" (photos, essays, one's phone number, etc.), and makes them accessible via authenticated APIs. So instead of posting a photo on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one would (ideally) authorize Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to read photos stored on the Pod with a "shared publicly" tag (or similar), and then anything with that tag would show up automatically in one's feed on all three sites, and (if also authorized) push reactions and comments back to the Pod. If I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like a neat idea. I'll be interested to see how well it does.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Context here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-l... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18101702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18101702
• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out. I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of the actual engineering mechanisms, something is wrong. It is hard for me to believe some consortium of really knowledgeable web architects and inventors made this. It feels like a PR website with attractive purple colors to make me feel cozy. But I want to know really how it works!
  • mtrn 8y ago
    > Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either. The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver. Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be." A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408.
    • jacobsimon 8y ago
      Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
      • msbarnett 8y ago
        The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?). RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
• evbots 8y ago
  This sounds like Blockstack. They've been in production with this for at least a year now.
• amelius 8y ago
  Please change "solid" to "Solid" (note capital) in the title.
• chongli 8y ago
  applications :( Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest. The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.
  • drawnwren 8y ago
    I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists. For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
    • ori_b 8y ago
      I use it. And people keep working hard to replace the standards it is built on with unimplementable complex, insecure, poorly thought out crap.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      You should probably ask yourself why you aren't. Because there's no gopher client for macOS. I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.
      • andersju 8y ago
        Plenty of terminal-based options (e.g. Lynx) for Gopher. Gopher pretty much died long before Google was a thing. Here's a good article: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... (lots of interesting comments below the article from many of the people involved)
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works Ok, I like it. Throw in some homomorphic encryption in the future, and maybe we can reverse all this SaaSS nonsense of today. I love the data stays owned by the user. It's how it should be. I hope the system has some provisions against applications encrypting the data on on user's POD.
  • tommoor 8y ago
    That page doesn't explain how it works at all :(
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Yeah :(. I just finished browsing the page and unfortunately, there's surprisingly little technical details about anything. Oh, you can build a client app with Angular. Cool. I'd much prefer to know how it all works.
• hendzen 8y ago
  Seems like a better marketed, but less-technically well thought out version of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io). Perhaps they should have acquired the IP from Kenton Varda.
  • jaimeyap 8y ago
    I had the same thought. The hard parts really are the containerization of apps, and the auth and permissions model. Sandstorm as far as I know is the best thought out attempt at tackling those problems.
• dgudkov 8y ago
  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.
  • azeirah 8y ago
    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.
    • IshKebab 8y ago
      The answer is not at all realistic or possible. Homomorphic crypto is a mathematical curiosity, not something that is any actual use currently.
    • kjetilk 8y ago
      Yup, it is. Though, I'm not sure about homomorphic encryption, but there has been some work on encryption in the academic community that has very clear application to Solid. Here's a paper written by some friends of mine: http://epub.wu.ac.at/5818/1/10.1007_978-3-319-58068-5_37.pdf http://epub.wu.ac.at/5818/1/10.1007_978-3-319-58068-5_37.pdf
    • jonnydubowsky 8y ago
      I've found https://www.openmined.org https://www.openmined.org use of homomorphic encryption to be really interesting, (+ Unity integration!)
  • jonnydubowsky 8y ago
    https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.2/access_control.html https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.2/acc... there are several emerging approaches to deliver that level of control over identity and artifacts. Each identity you provide to apps will have a root folder where you store the smart contract which maintains your sharing preferences and permissions. It's early days, but progress is being made, and it seems as if there will continue to be strong forces of co-opetition across the web3/indy web, and federated multi-verse. It will be interesting to see what kind of standards ultimately emerge and which community leads that charge.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• tannhaeuser 8y ago
  I really would like to support this, but I seem to miss the big picture. Looking at the github repos, Solid appears to be mostly about giving a second life to TBL's and W3c's failed pet projects, notably semantic web, linked data, RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD.
  • bass3l 8y ago
    I think Solid is the way those inventions (Linked data, RDF...etc) were meant to be used with each other.
  • TuringTest 8y ago
    What's wrong with bringing those back to life? Their organizing features have been unmatched by any application we have today, except maybe wikis. They didn't fail for not being useful, but because their engineering was clunky and their demands on resources were way beyond the hardware of the time. Also those systems were too complex for the classic programming techniques. Now that we have a better understanding of reactive programming and async dependencies, maybe we can finally build the tools ecosystem to take advantage of homoiconic data, and these systems can take off.
• espeed 8y ago
  See https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu
• ilaksh 8y ago
  Seems to be a rebranding of Linked Data. Need convincing that Linked Data is key to decentralized applications. I do think that the Semantic Web is still a cool idea though.
• coldtea 8y ago
  From the visionaries that gave us RDF and the Semantic Web.
• jeremyt 8y ago
  I might suggest taking a look at Blockstack and Urbit, which are efforts to do the exact same thing through two completely different approaches.
• carlsborg 8y ago
  Is the protocol open and documented? I couldn’t see it.
• sctb 8y ago
  Previous discussions (before the adoption by Inrupt): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764
• traverseda 8y ago
  I'm on mobile, so please excuse my innacurracie, but from memory how it works is pretty simple. A solid server is sort of like Dropbox. everything is a file, and you can give apps read-write access to a "folder". It also recommends the use of some XML thing so that all your "contact" objects are the same format.
  • coder543 8y ago
    Sounds about right. Even if we imagine that developers adopt this technology for some reason, what's to stop them from also keeping copies of any data they are granted access to? or just using it for auth and giving you no direct access to your data? It all seems too idealistic, since developers derive little benefit from the added complexity.
• codehenge 8y ago
  Interesting idea, but I'm interested in the security implications. Now I have a Pod that has all my data in it, and I can host this pod anywhere I want. Great, but its now the single target for getting all data on me. I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.
  • chippy 8y ago
    I believe (from scanning the website quickly) that you can host your own pod, but you can also put your data with third party. Currently, it offers 2 free options from a commercial provider and a community provider. So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!
    • codehenge 8y ago
      You are correct, but in this world I'm choosing a SINGLE third party to host ALL of my data. There's no distribution of risk, my data portfolio is undiversified, etc. They get hit, its all over. In fairness, I guess I could have a bunch of pods like financial, social, pictures... or even a pod for each service: facebook_pod, bank1_pod, etc...and host them all with different third parties to try to minimize risk. But this gets incredibly cumbersome.
    • GordonS 8y ago
      Any idea if data is encrypted by default? I didn't see any mention of encryption... or, TBH, much of anything other than rather ludicrous marketing language, which is very disappointing from TBL
• JepZ 8y ago
  Two years ago I wrote a little Progressive Web App which stores its data in an offline cache (browser) and syncs to my Nextcloud via WebDAV. IMHO that has pretty much the same advantages that Solid proclaims. I mean, in spirit I seem to value the same things as Solid (decentralized, own your data, etc.), but what I don't understand is why it has to introduce so many abstract/new names when it wants to be 'simple'? Building on top of the Semantic Web concepts isn't going to help either as it has enough disadvantages of its own (e.g., complex standards without adding any real value).
  • Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    ActivityPub suffers from this problem as well but has become widely used.
• amingilani 8y ago
  Honestly, for something this long in the works I was expecting a UI less... retro? I hesitate to call it outright bad, but I have no idea what to do after I create a pod. And I'm someone who knows how to write Solidity.
• darepublic 8y ago
  I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
  • jkaptur 8y ago
    What convention did you have in mind?
    • rhencke 8y ago
      We can create a language for it. It could be like HTML, using tags, but extensible, and the author could declare the schema of the information. You could even mix data from different schemas in the same document, using something like namespaces. Like, some kind of extensible markup language, almost.
  • snaky 8y ago
    How could you build advertising into the data?
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    Hm sounds reasonable. There can be a standardized markup language, maybe like a simplified SGML or something?
    • jackfraser 8y ago
      Hahaha, right? You're just going to rediscover the same path that lead us here to start with.
  • wes-k 8y ago
    Sounds like RSS and Atom.
• auggierose 8y ago
  Something like Solid probably needs a strongly inforced GDPR in place. Otherwise big actors can just access all the private pods and cache them in their own big data stores, and we are back to square one.
• holdenc 8y ago
  I like the spirit of this, but expecting average internet users to buy fancy hard-drives to store their data for apps that don't exist yet, simply to be free of the cloud, is way optimistic. Also, having a Solid pod does not prevent the worst kinds of personal data abuse, such as identity tracking and brokering of tracked data. I don't care that Facebook stores my photos, but I do care that they've built a profile around the contents of them.
• kstenerud 8y ago
  I don't get it... What is a pod and what's so great about it? Something about controlling your data... Storage space... Secure USB stick for the web? So I can mount it and add/remove files from it? Like dropbox or something? I clicked "Get a solid pod" and it asked me to register, which I did, after which it dumped me into some kind of "home page". Clicking "get started with solid and data browser" brings up instructions for creating notes and calendars and text files in a very primitive interface. There's no link to get back to the "home page" and the back button doesn't work because it's force-forwarding from an interim url. So is it like a primitive owncloud? What's it supposed to do that's valuable? What am I even looking at?
  • weavejester 8y ago
    My reading of it is that it's a database you control that you can allow third-party web applications to use. So instead of the web application storing your data on their servers, they store it on yours. From the perspective of the end user it's useful because retain control over your data, so there's no barriers to switching to a competitor, for instance.
• thefounder 8y ago
  This sounds good but in practice is hard to implement. Even for email clients we started to display generic/html pages to handle the authentication because we couldn't agree on a standard api/protocol. I doubt we will move into semantic web anytime soon.
• WiseWeasel 8y ago
  The (initial) killer app for this has to be warez. Messaging and publishing seem like compelling uses, but to get people to bust out the credit card to some pod host each month before there's a sufficient network built up to make those attractive, there's going to have to be a lot of pirated content available somehow.
• osrec 8y ago
  On a basic level, it seems to be the same old web, but rather than Facebook or some other company storing your data, you store it on a pod, and give the app access to it. Which is fine, until one day you share a bit too much, or you 'create' personal data in connected apps, which the app obviously has access to anyway. Not sure what this solves. Also, I can imagine lots of "pods as a service" popping up, which is kinda scary, because now it's not just your social life that's stored in one place, but ALL your personal data, including medical records and whatnot. Perhaps I've missed something, but they need to elaborate more on the underlying concepts driving this idea, as, like others, I'm not convinced of its validity.
  • juanuys 8y ago
    That said, I'd be happy if the NHS (National Health Service in the UK) can just point to my POD instead of asking for paper forms to be filled in each and every time you change your GP.
• z3t4 8y ago
  The hard part is ID, you need either a centralized authority or a standard specification.
  • rhencke 8y ago
    Solid uses the latter. WebID-TLS: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/tip/spec/tls-respec.html https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/tip/spec/tls-respec.ht... WebID-OIDC: https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc-spec https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc-spec
• Spivak 8y ago
  So how is a pod different than a self-hosted database?
  • erikb 8y ago
    Yeah, and how do people know which format the data has you put inside.
• dkoston 8y ago
  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. For example: I may want to provide heart rate data from my runs, workouts, and temperature data but not GPS. That’s getting very granular - Since every app will have different or possibly new types of data, having a central standard for data types and ACLs will be tough. - You’ll also need a mapping mechanism for where the data is stored and how it’s named and the formats that are being used. Even within a single app, you can denotmalize data and store it in multiple places for different purposes. I like the principle of this but it seems very challenging to adopt. I look forward to seeing someone solve the above challenges.
  • sleepychu 8y ago
    Same questions I have from reading "Build a Solid app in your lunch break", the app leverages the friends stored data but makes no mention of how the permissions system might work.
  • kjetilk 8y ago
    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 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.
• spurgu 8y ago
  One idea on top of this would be to store hashes of your files on a blockchain, to be able to prove original ownership.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jchanimal 8y ago
  The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL location-based identifiers roots it firmly in the past. I think the future is the robust content addressable distributed web. Which could give developers the same flexibility, and users the same friendly experience, but with everything virtualized in a peer to peer mesh. I’d like to see the developer smoothness of Solid married to future-proof content identifiers like this: https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md
  • abeppu 8y ago
    Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"? I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.
    • hobofan 8y ago
      Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;) I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.
      • nnq 8y ago
        The human concepts of ownership implies a very important right that people tend to overlook: the right to DESTROY it, to undo it, to "take back what you said". This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base). And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten. You have to burn books/libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things! And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom I want to have. Things like block-chain/graphs combined with content adressability bring significant limitations to FREEDOM. Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living. And on: > You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world. Yes you can, if you kill someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)
• nulbyte 8y ago
  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 your own Solid server," I successfully installed a single-user solid server. Great, now I have a single-user setup that is supposed to give me control over my data. So how do I authenticate as the single user? No clue. This thing is so secure, not even I can get my data! I would have expected something more useful from the inventor of a technology that so many people can use today without having to think much about it. EDIT: I deleted and started over. I still don't know what happened, but now at least I can create an account and login. Still not quite sure what I can do, now.
  • gfodor 8y ago
    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.
    • galfarragem 8y ago
      It seems kind of vaporware to test people's reactions and get allies. It's definitely interesting and could be game changing if well implemented. Microsoft and Apple could push it and win an important battle.
      • erikpukinskis 8y ago
        I am curious: Is it actually worthwhile to solicit this kind of “ally” interest? I would think you’d attract mostly onlookers, people who are puttering around thinking about these topics. People who may just gum up the mailing lists. Is it really likely to attract actual contributors? I’d think that comes more from providing something that solves a real problem for some obscure group of people.
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  So is the idea that we're going to swing back in the direction of personal websites again? Pretty much like an Angelfire 2.0? What separates this technology from everyone just making their own websites?
• Animats 8y ago
  Who's "Inrupt"? The main Solid site is https://solid.mit.edu/" 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.
  • tuukkah 8y ago
    A company of some respected people it seems: https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the-inrupters/ https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the-inrupters/
    • Animats 8y ago
      Theranos had an impressive collection of names, too.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • troymc 8y ago
    Fast Company wrote an article about Inrupt, published on September 29; see the link below. It has been in stealth mode and is only just launching publicly this week. https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-l...
  • pulkitsh1234 8y ago
    It's a company founded by Tim Berners-Lee himself, As a way to propel Solid. From https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web: So I have taken a sabbatical from MIT, reduced my day-to-day involvement with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and founded a company called inrupt where I will be guiding the next stage of the web in a very direct way. Inrupt will be the infrastructure allowing Solid to flourish
  • 8y ago
• ronreiter 8y ago
  I don't understand. HTML5 is on the way to become this. You have permissions, local storage, indexedDB, and a ton of APIs. Anything else you need you can just submit it to the HTML5 working group (e.g. shared data)
• EugeneOZ 8y ago
  Content is editable when it's allowed to be edited. We have "guestbooks", "chats", boards, commentaries, forums, even wiki-sites long time ago, so this issue is solved, "Solid" doesn't sound revolutionary in this scope.
• hobofan 8y ago
  Disclaimer: This comment contains some self-promotion (as we are working on a related solution) Solid overall looks very interesting, and I can very much empathize with the "decouple data and applications" magic aspect of it (even though they're not doing a great job describing it). My personal experience has been that with a good linked-data approach, building apps can become a lot easier, as linked (more specifically semantic data) mimics traditional information gathering much better, where you start with a small information point, and then enrich the data by just adding more and more related data points to it. I also found that a linked-data approach lends itself better to adaptive UIs, where one entity might be missing data, that another one has. All that being said, I feel like Solid made some (non-)decisions that might lead it down the same path as the things that were tried in the last Semantic Web hype: - Solid is using the same old linked-data formats, that are largely URL based. The problem with URL based systems is that the content behind those URLs might at any point disappear, or change. That makes it especially hard if you try to achieve some semantic conciseness, where the data you entered keeps at one point in time is guaranteed to keep its semantic meaning forever. - In a world where most application developers think about data models on the level of database tables, RDF/JSON-LD is too low level and verbose when trying to use it for building something sophisticated. W3C also standardized a higher level format, OWL2 (which can also be expressed in RDF(S)), which provides a nice abstraction level in its native form. Those are some of the lessons I've learned while working on Rlay[0], where among other things we've built a content-addressable adaptation of OWL2[1] for the decentralized web. We had to cut some small parts out of the specification so that the semantic stability of concepts is guaranteed when adding additional concepts to the worldwide ontology everyone is sharing, but overall the expressiveness is the same. Content-addressability has many nice side-effects, but the one I like the most when it comes to Semantic Data is that it allows for a much more organic evolvement of the concepts people are using. If you decide to add a new property to a concept, you can just do that, get a new content-addressing-hash and start using that instead of the old one. No need to add it to the de-facto centralized schema repository that is schema.org. I hope I didn't go off on too many tangents here. I've been meaning to write a blog post about the topics I touched on for a long time, but never really got around to it. Well at least this comment exists now. [0]: https://rlay.com https://rlay.com [1]: https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology
• juancampa 8y ago
  I like this and I'm in favor of decentralization. However, it's hard to imagine decentralized beating centralized when centralization has such a huge economic incentive. We need to create an environment where people and developers are incentivized to use/build decentralized systems. Maybe through law? Like a carbon tax would incentivize people to buy EVs. Data tax.
• ttt111222333 8y ago
  How does this solve problems of data leaks? Let's say some social network uses this Solid framework and you login with your Solid POD. Can't the social network then just save your data into a database? Now when the social network gets hacked millions of personal data is still released into the wild? What I'd like to see, is every device run a small process which can read the user's data. Html then has a syntax that can be interpreted like {{ solid://mydata/name }} {{ solid://mydata/profile.jpg }} {{ solid://mydata/age }} etc. That data is on the user's device encrypted. Apps can never read your data, they can only tell your device to display that data. That way developers cannot read your data, store them in their own databases, and then accidentally get their own database hacked and we are back to square one. I'd like the data on your device to be encrypted and have some type of homomorphic encryption such that if an app were to show average age of users, then an app would be able to run some sort of `select average(age) from users` but since the encryption is homomorphic, the app never learns information about any individual user. This would apply for machine learning operations too, so that we could get netflix style recommendations of movies, without a company ever learning what movies we liked, our age, etc. However, I don't know the first thing about homomorphic encryption so I guess I just have to wait until some great soul builds something like this for us.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• hellofunk 8y ago
  Maybe I've been programming too long, and I saw Solid POD and I read "a solid pile of data." Perhaps that was the intended play on words. I never saw the english word "pod".
  • troymc 8y ago
    It's like two peas in a pod. Or a pod of whales. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pod https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pod
    • hellofunk 8y ago
      I didn't say I don't know what "pod" means, I meant I did not see that word, only the acronym POD, when reading about this product.
• Dowwie 8y ago
  Looks like an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with a sharp landing page to attract attention
• gcb0 8y ago
  how is any of this different than "hotlinking" the A or IMG tag in html? it adds absolutely nothing besides that.
• sarreph 8y ago
  Please correct me if I’m missing something that technically prevents this, but once you grant a 3rd Party access to your data (via a SolidPOD), what’s to stop them scraping it and keeping it for themselves in order to build a profile on you?
• techntoke 8y ago
  Let me know when they have a new browser that doesn't use HTML and JavaScript.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• avivo 8y ago
  Paging Kenton Varda and the company/product/system he and his team created that does something very similar called Sandstorm: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/. (Kenton also led the protocol buffers team at Google which is their main format for data interchange). I'm curious how this is different.
  • kentonv 8y ago
    Hello... you paged? It looks like Solid has progressed since the last time I really looked into it. But, from what I recall, Solid focuses on standardizing data formats and storage... but not compute. That is, all of your personal data is stored in some central location chosen by you, and then web apps can access that data (if you give them permissions). The web apps themselves still run on their own servers, controlled by the respective developers. I'm skeptical of this model because: 1) If the code still runs on the developers' servers, there is no way to place technical restrictions on what they can do with your data. They can make a complete copy of whatever data you give them access to, they can store additional telemetry on the side, etc. 2) I think developers will resist standardized data formats because it makes it hard to develop new features. If you want to build any feature that requires storing additional data, it needs to be supported by the format. Perhaps the formats are extensible, but if multiple vendors do not agree on the extensions, then your data is no longer portable, defeating the purpose. I find it hard to imagine that any developer will voluntarily restrict themselves in this way without a huge incentive, and I don't see what that incentive is. (Certainly, not enough people care about data sovereignty for that to be an incentive.) My opinion is that data sovereignty efforts must focus not just on storage, but on compute. The servers on which code actually runs should report to the user, not to the developer. Developers should build apps, which run on the user's servers. This way, developers are still free to create whatever data formats they want, but the user ultimately controls the storage. Other developers can attempt to develop "compatible" software which can read the same data, but this doesn't hold anyone back from adding new features to their own software. But my own attempt to create such a platform didn't work out. So, you know, you shouldn't necessarily listen to me...
    • EGreg 8y ago
• Cort3z 8y ago
  > Step 2: add jQuery ....
• pulkitsh1234 8y ago
  So, I need to ensure that my POD(s) are up and running just to access other services (which will read data from my POD) ? Isn't that a step backwards ? or am I missing something ? Will the data be cached somewhere, so the services are accessible even if PODs go down ? If people can't run their own POD servers reliably, then they need to use some other cloud POD providers (Inrupt, as mentioned on the website). Which means your data is now with a third-party. Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value Won't Inrupt become one of those digital giants (in context of Solid) with access to numerous PODs of people who cannot reliably host them ?
• nabla9 8y ago
  The w3.org site describing solid is much better (even if some links don't work): https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html inrupt.com site is just marketing hype and crap experience.
  • lazarljubenovic 8y ago
    Was just about to say that after reading for a minute I understood nothing about the material. It was just a random array of buzzwords.
  • jgehrcke 8y ago
    The footer of the Wiki page says: "Last edited 3 years ago"
  • elheffe80 8y ago
    Thank you so much! I was wondering wtf this was about. Much clearer on the w3 site.
• minton 8y ago
  In order for apps to make use of your POD data you’d have to give them access to it and once they have it you’re back to the same experience as pre-Solid, right? What am I missing?
• rkagerer 8y ago
  Can someone clear this up for me? "This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice." "you never have to sync, because your data stays with you" If you choose to keep custody of your own "pod", how are you supposed to achieve redundancy without some kind of sync / backup process?
• usaphp 8y ago
  But what prevents an app that you gave permission to from copying your data and selling it to third parties, just like Facebook does?
• dumbfoundded 8y ago
  It seems like steemit.com may be a better model. On steemit, all of the data is public on a blockchain. As a result, things you share are public but not locked into any one application. Many apps exist using the same underlying structure but serve completely different purposes (See dtube)
• quotemstr 8y ago
  Solid appears to use TLS client certificates for authentication. (Granted, they're working on some kind of OAuth integration too.) WebID-TLS appears to have the same severe drawback that HTTP authentication does: the UI is provided by the browser, and so can't be customized, branded, or tweaked in any meaningful way by authentication providers. The TLS certificate dialog my browser presented just now attempting to use the "hello world" live demo also appeared to be extremely intimidating for non-technical users: for example, it presented long strings of hex numbers. I don't think Solid is going to get any meaningful adoption until the signup and authentication flows resemble those of major current social platforms, which have enjoyed years of usability optimization.
• zygotic12 8y ago
  Again
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• keithnz 8y ago
  One advantage is you can build up your data and different apps can re-use that data. Presumably you have to grant permission to use that data but apps could easily ask for access to much more data than it needs? This seems a little dangerous because people just say "Yes" when they want to use something. Or does it have a strategy for dealing with this?
• detritus 8y ago
  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 signed in, shows the same original information. What a mess.
  • usaphp 8y ago
    Why do you populate your personal details in the “thing” you don’t understand and have no control over in the first place?
    • detritus 8y ago
      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.
  • kjetilk 8y ago
    Mmmmm, sorry. So, we have an #UXFAIL here. I've relayed it on to the rest of the inrupters. Obviously, we're happy if you have more detailed experiences to share, there's a bunch of frontend stuff to fix (I'm working mostly on the server side and developer experience stuff).
  • timbl 8y ago
    Use the Access Control pane to remove public access from whatever you are worried about. If you go to your public folder in the data browser, then select the sharing control pane by hovering at the top of the pane so the pane icons appear and then click on the rainbow icon. You should see the access control list including yourself at the top as the owner, and public (a globe icon) at the bottom as readers - in green. Delete the globe icon line by hovering at the right side, clicking on the read minus sign, and then confirming you want to remove the public. (If you need to drag it back, there is a globe icon at the bottom you can always grab to drop into the access control list.) Sorry not better documented!
• albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  How is this different from https://tent.io https://tent.io ? Exactly the same principle, but it failed to get adoption. Perhaps because users don’t care where their data is stored, and most can barely comprehend it?
• ohiovr 8y ago
  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.
• jv22222 8y ago
  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.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  Not simple enough to attract anybody but geeks. The landing page of a project with ambitions to replace the existing web should target simple users and let them get in, see and access the value in a matter of a click on a very visible button labeled in a very obvious way rather than requiring them to learn how it works (the majority of people bringing money to the internet have no idea of how it works and little desire or capacity to learn that) and expecting them to get a clue they are supposed to click a button with a mysterious label "get a POD" and making them decide if they want their free pod to be provided by a commercial or a non-commercial entity (I bet they will rather click "apps" but there seems to be nothing there). Geeks like us are probably going to love it but geeks alone can't replace the web and fill it with economic value, we are to attract ordinary users.
• gobengo 8y ago
  I gave this talk[0] a few weeks ago at MyData 2018 about ActivityPub. Dmitry was going to come and talk about Solid on the same panel, but couldn't make it last minute. So I spoke a bit about Solid at the end too, and compared and contrasted. Kim Hamilton Duffy gave an illuminating talk right before me about "Decentralized Identifiers and Self Sovereign Identity Standards"[1] lmk if any feedback or questions [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCumzhfV9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCumzhfV9k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIM0zq37fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIM0zq37fU
• narrator 8y ago
  I really have to ask the perennial VC question: "Why Now?" . What changed that makes this technology ready for mass adoption?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• juskrey 8y ago
  Now remove Berners' name from this PR tide and try to make sense from all of that. Looks like another VC pump and dump project
• dandare 8y ago
  I hat websites like this: after reading for 3 minutes I learned that Solid is revolutionary, game changing and whatnot, but I have aboslutely no idea what it is. Very frustrating experience.
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    Yes indeed. Marketing buzzwords before any kind of substance.
  • hpcjoe 8y ago
    This early 2010s sitcom clip [1] comes to mind when reading about this. Many of the same buzzwords were used, in the same way. Notice the lack of substance in the product discussion, and the literal dancing around what it (Jabberwocky) was. Who needs a product, when you have a presentation. [1] https://youtu.be/spyJ5yxTfas https://youtu.be/spyJ5yxTfas
• m12k 8y ago
  So it's Diaspora meets a CMS? I thinking the issue here will be the chicken and egg problem - how do you bootstrap something like this without a killer app to drive adoption? After a certain critical mass adopts a system like that, all web applications start getting pressured toward supporting it too, but how do you ever build that critical mass to begin with? The whole point of the system is to prevent vendor lock-in, so what's the vendor's incentive to help make it popular?
  • tuukkah 8y ago
    I'm thinking the incumbents of each field that has a vendor lock-in problem could gather around this common platform and provide an open ecosystem as an alternative to all the monopolies that don't respect their users.
• transfire 8y ago
  Hello World example https://github.com/melvincarvalho/helloworld https://github.com/melvincarvalho/helloworld
• tomrod 8y ago
  How does this compare to Urbit?
• theyoungwolf 8y ago
  blockstack?
• kgwxd 8y ago
  Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the web, the wonderful, inclusive, open-to-everyone web. But his new focus is DRM for everyone. DRM is the complete opposite. Horrible, exclusive, open-to-money. It started with supporting EME, now this. I hate that he gets to use his own name to promote this, even more now that there's a "Sir" prefix.
• xte 8y ago
  Mh, can someone explain how is different this idea from old Plan9 model, except from the big limitation of "web" tech?
• redecentralize 8y ago
  There's a broader set of problems with the whole 'personal data store' space and a lack of evidence of user research to address big problems users have and incentive for companies / app developers that would drive the necessary adoption for impact. https://medium.com/@shevski/how-solid-is-tims-plan-to-redecentralize-the-web-b163ba78e835 https://medium.com/@shevski/how-solid-is-tims-plan-to-redece...
• henryluo 8y ago
  Yes, Solid is something to looking forward to. Many years ago, we face the vendor lock-in problem from the software giants, due to proprietary data formats. Thanks to Berners Lee, W3C, XML and open source community, that is less of a problem today. But now we face the problem of vendor lock-in, not due to proprietary formats, but due to cloud-service lock-in. With all the software giants, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ... offering their services primarily as cloud services, this cloud lock-in issue is going to become more severe in years to come. It's a new war the software industry needs to fight. It cannot be addressed just by one person, one project, one organization. It needs collaboration from the entire community.