8 ms·

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 W

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.
- ericand 8y ago
  Especially considering that they claim you can make an app in a lunch hour. They were just one lunch hour from a "solid" launch!
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  isn't there something about if you wait to launch until you have a basic well-polished example you launched too late?
  - gfodor 8y ago
    no, the saying is that if you aren't embarrassed by your first version you've launched too late. it doesn't mean that if you launch something embarrassing you've launched on time. a new, far reaching platform for internet data exchange launching without a basic proof of concept seems like a clear and obvious gap that should have been filled before launch.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      i.e. A->B != !A->!B
- jcoffland 8y ago
  https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD
  - tuukkah 8y ago
    Do some of these work? I haven't been able to login to any including the ones listed here: https://github.com/solid/solid-apps https://github.com/solid/solid-apps
- kjetilk 8y ago
  Well, I guess we just asked the opposite question: Is there any reason to keep this sub-surface any longer, and we didn't find any such reason... :-) So, it is just "release early, release often". So, the code and the spec has been out there for a long time. I mean, some of this stuff is really old. Us geeks have been thinking about decentralized social networking since the dawn of ages, and it seems like the rest of the world is starting to wake up to its necessity too. So, I think the timing is pretty OK now. Like, Linux didn't come with a well-polished example either... It wasn't even intended to out-do Minix. :-) I guess you could say that we could say even more clearly that this is a prototype, and we have a roadmap where it will stay a prototype for some time. But we are seeing people finding it interesting that we're actually not trying to engineer something from the ground, we are seeing what kind of impact we can have with pretty well tested Web technologies. I suspect we have a lot less development to do to have a great social impact than you'd have to do if went full P2P. At the same time, there is a large graveyard out there of failed decentralized social networks, so we are under no illusion that this is going to be easy. It is going to be pretty hard. Still, I don't see any reason why we should be sub-surface any longer.
  - jellicle 8y ago
    It would be good to have a set of demo applications that do something that can't be done by competitors. I read the website and I don't really get it. If I give an app read access to my data, they've got a copy. Maybe they don't have the canonical copy, the original, but they've certainly got A copy. How do I have control? As far as I can tell you've reinvented Facebook with a better API. Why wouldn't someone just embrace and extend to take control? "Oh yes, we made some changes to our PODs so you won't get full functionality with other people's PODs. You can just move your data to our company with a click of a button, CLICK HERE, and everything will work great! Also, we no longer support exports of data, sorry. But we'll take really good care of your data, we promise!" Maybe I'm dumb and I just don't get it, that's certainly possible. But maybe you're not doing a good job of explaining it.
  - gfodor 8y ago
    I think I saw a few example apps linked elsewhere -- the apps section of the marketing-oriented website just said "coming soon." I think it'd be a good idea to show these apps off, even if they are unfinished. I know I'm personally skeptical of any specification that lacks working examples, and the website, due to its lack of apps, implies there are none (hence my "afaict.") good luck with the launch!
- j45 8y ago
  Why? The web seemed to grow on with this kind of roll out.
tuukkah 8y ago
This may be hint regarding how to authenticate: https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server#testing-solid-locally https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server#testing-solid-loc... > In order to really get a feel for the Solid platform, and to test out solid, you will need the following: > 1. A WebID profile and browser certificate from one of the Solid-compliant identity providers, such as solid.community. EDIT: Seems if you run `solid init` and accept the defaults, it will configure a local WebID provider that you can register to on first use.
- _red 8y ago
  I look forward to the day where getting on the internet is like opening a bank account, complete with KYC verification. I will love standing in line at my local DMV and waiting for my WebID profile to be approved.
  - tfha 8y ago
    It'll be nice when browsing without a license is punishable the same way driving without a license is. People will finally be held accountable for the things they say and do online.
    - danShumway 8y ago
      I feel the exact same way about writing. How much human suffering has been caused by people's ability to just read and write down anything whenever they want? There is zero accountability! Heck, nowadays, I can even make graphics on a computer and then walk into Staples and print them out on official-looking, high quality paper. And they even have the gall let me pay anonymously in cash! In the good old days, only the Church could publish books, so everything that was written down was thoughtful and true.
      - mbrumlow 8y ago
        I just had flash backs of Reddit...
afpx 8y ago
I hope there’s a lot more than that. I mean, they claim that they’ve been working on it for 15 years. “Solid has taken 15 years of development work to finally deliver this.” I probably missed something, but I didn’t see mention of Solid being taken through a standards body, either (even his own one). Web protocols were standardized early and were royalty free, with working prototypes. That helped lead to quick adoption.
- imhoguy 8y ago
  To me it looks like as another incarnation of semantic web stuff.
  - apatters 8y ago
    This was my first impression too. Tim and a certain contingency have always wanted that stuff to take off, but the benefits have never been clear enough to make it happen. It's an easy concept to overengineer. The Web took off because it was simple. Anyone could author a rich document in HTML and share it just by sticking it in a folder and passing around the link. The Web now gets harder by the day, so history just might repeat itself sooner or later. I think Solid needs to start with cleaning up their communications as the whole thing is hard to understand.
- juancampa 8y ago
  IMO it's a waste of time to try to standardize something that hasn't proven its value yet. Leads to a design-by-committee situation (committee should be spelled ccoommeettii)
- nabla9 8y ago
  As far as I see, solid is just bunch of existing standards bundled together. Especially RDF and things related to it. The w3.org site describing solid is actually more readable: https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD See also https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
- rst 8y ago
infocollector 8y ago
Thought this was similar with more details: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/03/9f/7779479a08c664/US9298935.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/03/9f/7779479...
astrowilliam 8y ago
Here's some more information about the app experience. I'm sure this is a very very early test to see how many people are interested. I, for 1 and super excited to take back my data. https://www.inrupt.com/our-work/ https://www.inrupt.com/our-work/
codingdave 8y ago
> I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Yes, That is very similar to how I felt when I first found the web. I forget how early it was (1991?), but I was on gopher and saw the docs and a few small sites and had the same thought -- mildly interesting, but not much there. But it took off quickly, and I'd say within 2 years from my first seeing it, gopher was dying, browsers were coming out for Windows and I was trying to explain to people that this was going to change the world. Will this change it, too? Who knows. But I'm not going to dismiss it just because it is starting small.
KirinDave 8y ago
There was almost nothing on the WWW, gopherspace was still the big thingy, and many folks still had their email hand-delivered via UUCP.
j45 8y ago
> I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. It did feel like a new beginning.. combined with a "that's it?", combined with a "how will they ever get everything online?" At the time, no one was really online or knew what the internet was. Protocols like Gopher, Archie worked ok, and there was a BBS world.. Still, the web just felt unspeakably different to what came before in an indefinable way. If application logic can be separated from data in Solid, this could be meaningful evolution to the web. Imagine plugging in all of our existing data in one app or database into any other app or database.
samirm 8y ago
security implies availability friendo
pfschell 8y ago
That’s exactly how the Web was at first. I clearly remember downloading Mosaic in the summer of 1993, a few months after its release. I clicked around for a few minutes, but quickly ran out of content. So I went back to gopherspace, which was rich and endless in comparison.
mercer 8y ago
I'm very interested in 'new things', especially in this area, and I find it incredibly frustrating how bad they often are for a significant number of users. One of the more promising initiatives I've seen recently is Patchwork, which is a kind of Facebook or social network that runs on the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol. It's a user-friendly app that you can download, and after getting over the hurdle of adding a 'pub', you can get things going pretty quickly. What frustrates me is that I can imagine quite a few people would go through the trouble to install the app, non-geeks included, even though it means going to a weird .nz domain and even though simply searching for 'Patchwork' on Google isn't enough. In my experience there's a subset of the general population that will be willing to do this. But then they get an app that does nothing, and they'll have to figure out that to use the app, they need to add a 'pub' server. Doing so requires a bit of searching and then adding the pubs to the app. I'd say that's a bridge too far for most. The same goes for developers. Patchwork is written in Node.js and for various reasons there's no easy way to write clients in other languages. Even though I am familiar with Node.js programming, it's enough of a hurdle that even as a fan I just resigned myself to just wait until something more user-friendly shows up (Elixir client plz). My point is that Patchwork/SSB has been one of the best-implemented things I've seen, and yet it sucks enough that I hesitate to recommend to 'regular' users or developers. And the frustrating thing is that, considering the effort involved, it wouldn't be that much more work to bridge the gap. But doing that is just not interesting enough, and so the whole thing remains a niche that will probably die in due time.

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.
ericand 8y ago
Especially considering that they claim you can make an app in a lunch hour. They were just one lunch hour from a "solid" launch!
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
isn't there something about if you wait to launch until you have a basic well-polished example you launched too late?
- gfodor 8y ago
  no, the saying is that if you aren't embarrassed by your first version you've launched too late. it doesn't mean that if you launch something embarrassing you've launched on time. a new, far reaching platform for internet data exchange launching without a basic proof of concept seems like a clear and obvious gap that should have been filled before launch.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    i.e. A->B != !A->!B
jcoffland 8y ago
https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD
- tuukkah 8y ago
  Do some of these work? I haven't been able to login to any including the ones listed here: https://github.com/solid/solid-apps https://github.com/solid/solid-apps
kjetilk 8y ago
Well, I guess we just asked the opposite question: Is there any reason to keep this sub-surface any longer, and we didn't find any such reason... :-) So, it is just "release early, release often". So, the code and the spec has been out there for a long time. I mean, some of this stuff is really old. Us geeks have been thinking about decentralized social networking since the dawn of ages, and it seems like the rest of the world is starting to wake up to its necessity too. So, I think the timing is pretty OK now. Like, Linux didn't come with a well-polished example either... It wasn't even intended to out-do Minix. :-) I guess you could say that we could say even more clearly that this is a prototype, and we have a roadmap where it will stay a prototype for some time. But we are seeing people finding it interesting that we're actually not trying to engineer something from the ground, we are seeing what kind of impact we can have with pretty well tested Web technologies. I suspect we have a lot less development to do to have a great social impact than you'd have to do if went full P2P. At the same time, there is a large graveyard out there of failed decentralized social networks, so we are under no illusion that this is going to be easy. It is going to be pretty hard. Still, I don't see any reason why we should be sub-surface any longer.
- jellicle 8y ago
  It would be good to have a set of demo applications that do something that can't be done by competitors. I read the website and I don't really get it. If I give an app read access to my data, they've got a copy. Maybe they don't have the canonical copy, the original, but they've certainly got A copy. How do I have control? As far as I can tell you've reinvented Facebook with a better API. Why wouldn't someone just embrace and extend to take control? "Oh yes, we made some changes to our PODs so you won't get full functionality with other people's PODs. You can just move your data to our company with a click of a button, CLICK HERE, and everything will work great! Also, we no longer support exports of data, sorry. But we'll take really good care of your data, we promise!" Maybe I'm dumb and I just don't get it, that's certainly possible. But maybe you're not doing a good job of explaining it.
- gfodor 8y ago
  I think I saw a few example apps linked elsewhere -- the apps section of the marketing-oriented website just said "coming soon." I think it'd be a good idea to show these apps off, even if they are unfinished. I know I'm personally skeptical of any specification that lacks working examples, and the website, due to its lack of apps, implies there are none (hence my "afaict.") good luck with the launch!
j45 8y ago
Why? The web seemed to grow on with this kind of roll out.

tuukkah 8y ago

This may be hint regarding how to authenticate: https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server#testing-solid-locally https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server#testing-solid-loc... > In order to really get a feel for the Solid platform, and to test out solid, you will need the following: > 1. A WebID profile and browser certificate from one of the Solid-compliant identity providers, such as solid.community. EDIT: Seems if you run `solid init` and accept the defaults, it will configure a local WebID provider that you can register to on first use.

_red 8y ago
I look forward to the day where getting on the internet is like opening a bank account, complete with KYC verification. I will love standing in line at my local DMV and waiting for my WebID profile to be approved.
- tfha 8y ago
  It'll be nice when browsing without a license is punishable the same way driving without a license is. People will finally be held accountable for the things they say and do online.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    I feel the exact same way about writing. How much human suffering has been caused by people's ability to just read and write down anything whenever they want? There is zero accountability! Heck, nowadays, I can even make graphics on a computer and then walk into Staples and print them out on official-looking, high quality paper. And they even have the gall let me pay anonymously in cash! In the good old days, only the Church could publish books, so everything that was written down was thoughtful and true.
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      I just had flash backs of Reddit...

afpx 8y ago

I hope there’s a lot more than that. I mean, they claim that they’ve been working on it for 15 years. “Solid has taken 15 years of development work to finally deliver this.” I probably missed something, but I didn’t see mention of Solid being taken through a standards body, either (even his own one). Web protocols were standardized early and were royalty free, with working prototypes. That helped lead to quick adoption.

imhoguy 8y ago
To me it looks like as another incarnation of semantic web stuff.
- apatters 8y ago
  This was my first impression too. Tim and a certain contingency have always wanted that stuff to take off, but the benefits have never been clear enough to make it happen. It's an easy concept to overengineer. The Web took off because it was simple. Anyone could author a rich document in HTML and share it just by sticking it in a folder and passing around the link. The Web now gets harder by the day, so history just might repeat itself sooner or later. I think Solid needs to start with cleaning up their communications as the whole thing is hard to understand.
juancampa 8y ago
IMO it's a waste of time to try to standardize something that hasn't proven its value yet. Leads to a design-by-committee situation (committee should be spelled ccoommeettii)
nabla9 8y ago
As far as I see, solid is just bunch of existing standards bundled together. Especially RDF and things related to it. The w3.org site describing solid is actually more readable: https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD See also https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
rst 8y ago

infocollector 8y ago

Thought this was similar with more details: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/03/9f/7779479a08c664/US9298935.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/03/9f/7779479...

astrowilliam 8y ago

Here's some more information about the app experience. I'm sure this is a very very early test to see how many people are interested. I, for 1 and super excited to take back my data. https://www.inrupt.com/our-work/ https://www.inrupt.com/our-work/

codingdave 8y ago

> I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Yes, That is very similar to how I felt when I first found the web. I forget how early it was (1991?), but I was on gopher and saw the docs and a few small sites and had the same thought -- mildly interesting, but not much there. But it took off quickly, and I'd say within 2 years from my first seeing it, gopher was dying, browsers were coming out for Windows and I was trying to explain to people that this was going to change the world. Will this change it, too? Who knows. But I'm not going to dismiss it just because it is starting small.

KirinDave 8y ago

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

j45 8y ago

> I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. It did feel like a new beginning.. combined with a "that's it?", combined with a "how will they ever get everything online?" At the time, no one was really online or knew what the internet was. Protocols like Gopher, Archie worked ok, and there was a BBS world.. Still, the web just felt unspeakably different to what came before in an indefinable way. If application logic can be separated from data in Solid, this could be meaningful evolution to the web. Imagine plugging in all of our existing data in one app or database into any other app or database.

samirm 8y ago

security implies availability friendo

pfschell 8y ago

That’s exactly how the Web was at first. I clearly remember downloading Mosaic in the summer of 1993, a few months after its release. I clicked around for a few minutes, but quickly ran out of content. So I went back to gopherspace, which was rich and endless in comparison.

mercer 8y ago

I'm very interested in 'new things', especially in this area, and I find it incredibly frustrating how bad they often are for a significant number of users. One of the more promising initiatives I've seen recently is Patchwork, which is a kind of Facebook or social network that runs on the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol. It's a user-friendly app that you can download, and after getting over the hurdle of adding a 'pub', you can get things going pretty quickly. What frustrates me is that I can imagine quite a few people would go through the trouble to install the app, non-geeks included, even though it means going to a weird .nz domain and even though simply searching for 'Patchwork' on Google isn't enough. In my experience there's a subset of the general population that will be willing to do this. But then they get an app that does nothing, and they'll have to figure out that to use the app, they need to add a 'pub' server. Doing so requires a bit of searching and then adding the pubs to the app. I'd say that's a bridge too far for most. The same goes for developers. Patchwork is written in Node.js and for various reasons there's no easy way to write clients in other languages. Even though I am familiar with Node.js programming, it's enough of a hurdle that even as a fan I just resigned myself to just wait until something more user-friendly shows up (Elixir client plz). My point is that Patchwork/SSB has been one of the best-implemented things I've seen, and yet it sucks enough that I hesitate to recommend to 'regular' users or developers. And the frustrating thing is that, considering the effort involved, it wouldn't be that much more work to bridge the gap. But doing that is just not interesting enough, and so the whole thing remains a niche that will probably die in due time.