16 ms·

How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

291 points by okket 8y ago

dustingetz 8y ago
Can anyone name one for-profit company that wants to build software on Solid?
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  The concept excites me. I want companies to sell software for a dollar value. That's what solid leaves open as the one remaining business model. You can't use my data so you're just selling an app for five bucks or whatever. With the runaway success of microtransactions, I doubt this interests many. You can even see it in gaming. Spend $100 on Assassin's Creed and it still wants you to cough up $10 for exp boosts.
  - mrep 8y ago
    > With the runaway success of microtransactions What are you talking about?
    - unmole 8y ago
      I'm guessing he was talking about the revenue model of the most profitable mobile games.
      - luckystarr 8y ago
        Especially the fact that it's working.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  I don't think that's a great mark of success early on.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    I've been reading about solid for three years now and there's nothing. In 1992, the Web was doubling every 3-4 months according to Weaving the Web by Tim Berners Lee page 66 which I happen to have sitting on my desk. Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94. Solid has nothing.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94 Only Netscape is a for-profit company, and it took 3 years of the Web existing to be founded.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- codingdave 8y ago
  Why does it have to be a for-profit company?
  - nine_k 8y ago
    To be able to hire good engineers to work on Solid full time.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    you’re right, it’s a good question. my instinct is that markets get to the truth about what people need or want sufficiently to pay for. there’s a lot of virtue signaling and lip flapping bs to cut through in the dweb space.
- kromem 8y ago
  It's not like the early Internet was a haven of for profit companies in the early days. Early on most of the profit was in providing the access, not the content.
  - seanhunter 8y ago
    This would be competing against the existing internet though, where there are a lot of for-profit companies fuelling the content (for the consumer). If I'm a business I need to decide whether to back a scrappy startup infrastructure with no users or to go with the established internet with a vast potential customerbase. If I'm a user I need to decide between the existing internet with vast swathes of content and huge numbers of different services and this new network with better protections for my privacy but basically none of the above. The early internet was innately disruptive and extremely different from anything that was there before. This doesn't have that advantage as far as I can see.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    there doesn’t need to be a haven, i only asked for the name of a single entity!
- gibsonf1 8y ago
  graphMetrix.com - Solid service to support business customer data launching in the next 2 months.
- lvs 8y ago
  Is that a remotely important question? You couldn't have answered such a question on ARPANET, or more pertinently when TimBL was at CERN. You're one of those people who thinks the internet was built by for-profit companies, and therefore you're one of the people who doesn't know any history.
tareqak 8y ago
Given the tendency for wealth and power to concentrate, is it possible to design a competitive, and efficient system where all the actors are sufficiently prosperous without the formation of any monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies? Edit: a follow-up thought. If the answer is no or "it's too hard", then is it possible have something along the same lines, is it possible for the proposed system to self-correct away from monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies should they form?
- mLuby 8y ago
  Your second point is the critical one, and I'll add to it — there must be an incentive to decentralize, and it must outweigh the numerous incentives to re-centralize. We need to centralize around protocols/standards and decentralize ownership of data. If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law…
  - tareqak 8y ago
    Yeah, it probably more realistic (and possibly even ideal in its own way) to assume that obtaining the desired equilibrium will always be an adversarial process. Having proven ways to measure the dominance of each actor or having canaries / alerts is important, but not enough: there has to be ways to measures detect if anyone has subverted, gamed, or compromised the measures themselves.
  - lovemenot 8y ago
    >> If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law… Dave and I agree with your diagnosis, and we would like to propose a solution. Who is Dave? Well you know him, and I know that you know him and I know that when we both talk about Dave we must be talking about the same person. (mLuby I probably don't really know you, this is just a hypothetical). A casual observer could not approach our common understanding by adding more data. There's so many Daves after all. In fact they'd need to subtract all but the right data. So the solution is a protocol in which increased data adds noise faster than it adds signal. Such a protocol requires 1000s times more plausible yet incorrect noise for every signal. Digital chaff.
debacle 8y ago
Isn't this plan the same as the last plan (the name of which I can't even remember - app something. There was a kickstarter), just with Tim Berners-Lee's name attached to it? My main concern is that this project is DOA for the same reason that the last few have been - too much of an academic focus tending towards navel-gazing, not enough network effect to draw hobbyists, and zero money to attract businesses. The PDS needs to be a personal cpanel. Something with powertools for the enthusiast but enough shiny for the tech hipsters to use it even if they don't know why. It needs to be designed with an Apple-like mindset from end to end, and willing to make fundamental and architectural compromises (or sacrifices) for user aesthetic. That probably wont happen. If the effort around this was instead used to make something like Mastodon better, we might see much more widespread adoption of that platform. You could probably find non-profit funding for sufficient centralized infrastructure to kickstart a healthy mesh network.
- gnfurlong 8y ago
  Node-solid-server is just one implementation of the spec. There's nothing stopping another implementation from having a cpanel like management interface.
  - gibsonf1 8y ago
    I'm going with SBCL Lisp and Allegrograph and Caveman. Anyone interested in teaming up on the Solid Lisp library? cl-solid
    - mark_l_watson 8y ago
      Count me in. My email is in my profile. As much as I like AllegroGraph (and I wrote a book using AllegroGraph) if you want people to be able to install your project easily, then using SQLite, or something similar, might make it easier for people try try it out.
      - gibsonf1 8y ago
        Great Mark, Agreed - the cl-json library will handle all the Solid standards and then developers can layer on top of that their preferred db etc. I'm not sure if we need a db for the core library or not...
jacquesm 8y ago
Obligatory cynical comment: It won't work. For the simple reason that if it is successful commerce will find a way in. A large enough group of people will always be marketed to in one way or another. And once that happens the budgets will follow and before you know it you are in the next phase of centralization. I would not know of a way to side-step this effect, unless the plan is to create something that only few people will ever use. The internet already is for everyone - everyone with an internet connection, that is - and that is precisely the problem. So unless you are willing to drastically limit the influx of users sooner or later there will be a swing back to centralization, for instance by companies that require you to give up some of your rights in exchange for hosting your data. And then you are more or less back to today, only with lots of little data-stores that can be merged at will by whoever controls the storage facility after you cough up your keys in return for something shiny.
- Kostchei 8y ago
  It's not about avoiding marketing. It's about ownership and control. If I want my stuff to be analysed- I let that happen- it finds business or social matches- awesome. I just need the option to turn that off for things I don't want greped- like banking. I too am in favor of paid for services. Because that is what happens eventually. You pay for it. I'd rather make a decision and choose who I pay, as opposed to having my choices and VIEW-OF-THE-WORLD limited because everything is "free" but funded by marketing.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I would love to 'own' all my data. But companies offering services will win out because they do not have to play nice with you or your data store. Take Gmail, Facebook or Google docs as examples. In principle that's your data. But Gmail has successfully convinced people that Google is able to run its mail service better than you or your corporation ever could. In return for 'reading your mail', and vast amounts of corporations and individuals seem to believe them. Ditto for Facebook and yet another encore for Google docs. Once established economies of scale and network effects will do the rest. A new system would have to fix a lot more than just the security angle because it is well known that security is always going to be secondary to convenience, a factor that large entities will find much easier to control than many small ones. So, I really hope they will manage but I'm not going to hold my breath until they do. Note this comes from a guy that does not have a Facebook account, no smartphone, runs his own web and mail server.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zsck 8y ago
A lot of folks seem to think this kind of technology needs to be marketed or launched the way a hip Silicon Valley startup should be. I understand how the argument that critical mass is the necessary ingredient for success would appeal to people, but it’s not like the Internet succeeded that way. In fact, it’s probably better if foundational technology like this is developed and grown more slowly and deliberately. I have no idea if solid will take off the way the web has, but it stands a fighting chance. More than being a “viable competitor” to the web, it needs to be a platform that people want to develop for. As with the web, cloud and mobile ecosystems, the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. If you want to see something like solid take off, play around with it for a bit. Try making it go and share your experience.
- egonschiele 8y ago
  > the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    I think you may be in a bubble. Many developers like apple, and facebook enough to work for them. In fact, its that which keeps both platforms viable in the face of stiff competiton and shallow moats.
    - skosch 8y ago
      You're talking past each other: contributing to the App Store isn't the same as working for Apple.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      Facebook has a shallow moat? People only use it at all because of the network effect. And Apple's main draw is the large number of affluent customers. They'll have developers as long as they have those users, whether the developers like it or not. Which is why they can get away with charging 30% to developers when platforms have historically given incentives to developers to develop for their platform.
gibsonf1 8y ago
It seems the author is missing the point in advocating big government solutions and government regulation to somehow fix the privacy problem. Imagine if you owned and controlled all your email vs. gmail reading it all? For companies, owning their proprietary data is an enormous market. I'm planning to launch a Solid service on top of Allegrograph in the next month or two to service my business customers.
- wmf 8y ago
  I don't think they're missing anything. The article mentions that even though you "own" your data in Solid, companies will still cajole you into "consenting" for them to data-mine it.
  - gibsonf1 8y ago
    For the email example, people will have a choice of paying a small amount for a cross-platform private/encrypted UX service, or free by allowing a company to read and datamine all of their email. I'm guessing a surprising number of people will pay a small amount for privacy given how badly things are going in the silos today. And that UX service can easily import a users entire email history from google and others, and then use the graph to expose relationships and browsing not currently available in google and other services.
PhilWright 8y ago
The problem with your personal data store is that it will be impossible to stop the large companies like Google/Facebook from simply copying and caching a copy of all the data they need to access. You give them permission to handle your email and calendar information and bingo, they have a copy of your entire set of emails and appointments. If you use multiple services from Google/Facebook then they will end up with a good copy of your entire dataset and can mine it of value just like they already do.
- gibsonf1 8y ago
  On the other hand, what would stop the rise of email UX companies that provide a PAID service that links to your email with the explicit promise of never caching it? They wouldn't need to mine it to make money as google does, as they are being paid, even though the per user cost payment could be quite low to support a profitable email UX company.
  - bostonvaulter2 8y ago
    How could you prove/trust that they never cache the data? I think the only way is if the "app" actually ran on your PDS (Personal Data Store) instead of somewhere else. Of course that brings other challenges.
    - cma 8y ago
      Ideally you'd pay them and that would be part of the contract. Otherwise demand a legally enforceable promise (via promissory estoppel).
      - shareometry 8y ago
        I also think there is a need to figure out how to enable community-controlled SaaS platforms in addition to this. LibreOffice, for example, has essentially released an online office suite. But it has decided not to actually operate and offer this suite to the public in ready-to-use fashion. From what I understand, it is just too difficult and resource-intensive to do that. So it's up to companies running paid platforms to do it (or you can spin it up on your own server/instance and run it yourself). There's nothing inherently wrong with this. But it seems to me that there's a "next step" to take by figuring out how to enable fully community-controlled platforms so that a project like an open source G Suite (running at scale with an iron-clad privacy guarantee that is backed by community audits) that you can just go create an account on could become a reality one day. This seems like it would require a non-profit organization akin to Mozilla. How great would it be to have a community-controlled non-profit organization operating a trusted cloud platform, perhaps even audited by a group like the EFF? Very challenging, for sure. But it seems humanly possible.
croisillon 8y ago
"redecentralize founder" writing a post on medium.com, oh the irony
- drngdds 8y ago
  It's like everyone forgot you can host your own blog
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    It drives me nuts when friends and associates write long form content on other people’s/organization’s platforms. The purpose of FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, etc. should be as a place to put a link to your content in your own domain.
edhelas 8y ago
By reading the Solid website I was wondering if it was not basically what OpenID tried to offers 10 years ago? https://openid.net/what-is-openid/ https://openid.net/what-is-openid/ > OpenID allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords. > You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit. Is Solid having the NIH syndrome?
- frabcus 8y ago
  There are some similarities. But the key difference are: 1) Solid is designed for you to store large, complete sets of data you care about over the protocol. OpenID is mainly about identity, and the associated bits of metadata are small and can't be written to by the OpenID protocol. 2) Solid separates the data storage from the application provider. So all your data could be in your Solid personal data store, and none in the application provider. (This was normal on Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, so think of it as a cloud version of that model of application development / data storage). This is a high level quick answer - correct me if I've misrepresented something. Quickly looking there are lots of OpenID-related standards that I've never read or used, and I bet some write data!
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    In that sense, I think it's more like https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/
honestoHeminway 8y ago
It will not work out - as long as there is no eocsystem whos central financial motivation is to provide a counter-trend to centralization and control, as wished for by every manager ever.
xtf 8y ago
I would be happier in a decentralized network staying connected with other sheeple and have my own options of sharing information. This is an attempt to doom it before it was even tried.
- drasticmeasures 8y ago
  Facebook / gov can import all your data from Solid, rendering your options of who to share info with a cruel illusion.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
The man deserves credit of course for helping create the first browsers and promoting the early web and his work for W3C. However, Tim's track record is not great when it comes to backing new versions of the web. E.g. Semantic Web never happened and arguably this is his latest attempt at flogging that dead horse. So, my prediction is that this won't get very far. It seems the website is a bit hand-wavy on the actual substance or vision and from what I'm seeing there's not actually a lot there. This looks like a research prototype to me. I like the idea of decentralized as much as the next geek. However, there's a tendency of complex decentralized stuff being something that normal people don't really grasp or see the value of. Also, a lot of this value is not very tangible or even real. Most p2p systems have a hard time competing against a well run centralized system. A lot of these decentralized Facebook/Twitter alternatives are being populated by people that, well, aren't that social. If you are like that, the empty room problem (you have no friends until world + dog joins) is not a big problem. You might even consider that a feature and not a bug. However, solving the empty room problem really is the key problem for social networks. How do you get all the social media whores, self pro-claimed influencers, etc. from endorsing your super duper decentralized platform and wanting to be there? Mostly that never happens.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  "Mostly that never happens. " Might be because there are no decentralized competitors to facebook, who offer the same possibilities bugfree. Never seen that.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Same isn't good enough. You need a killer app to get people to switch.
    - hutzlibu 8y ago
      When you offer the same technical possibilities, but coorporation free, that is enough difference to get a critical mass of people to join. Signal for example still can't compete with WhatsApp on everything, but is good enough now to get some traction.
ElBarto 8y ago
In my view Solid is trying to provide a technical solution to a problem that isn't technical. The internet and web are already decentralised technical solutions. But self-hosting is not a feasible solution for people and network effects mean that they'll gravitate to a few platforms. That's simply the way it is. Google, Facebook, etc. naturally emerged and similar near-monopolies will emerge with any other technology providing a decentralised network, including Solid.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
yason 8y ago
People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices. What I'm worried about is actively preventing decentralized, small-scale or hackership services. If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR, or I can't host my own email server, or serve HTTP out of my home box, or get decent bandwidth for a private virtual network, Tor, I2P or IPFS while Netflix works at full speed, or do about anything else than initiate HTTP/HTTPS connections to known big company grade services or be flagged as a malicious endpoint, then there will not be a decentralised network living within the same infrastructure as the centralised behemoths. And that is the death people are talking about. A marginal decentralised segment of the current internet is still larger than the whole decentralised internet in its early years. As long as the old ways of networking can live, develop, and grow along with the FANG & co that's fine. But it might not be taken for granted, eventually.
- Juliate 8y ago
  "People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let the King and nobles be educated, decide, rule them and govern the country." could have said many 3 centuries ago. Cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association. "Because freedom of association necessarily recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organisation, aside from the government, it has been a primary target for repression by all dictatorial societies." And that freedom is rather young (19th century). Hosting/owning data and the processes on them is no different as an exercise of sovereignity. At this point, today, it's more a matter of law (it must be recognized and guaranteed) than a matter of ability (it's possible) or market (it exists). That's where the battle is.
  - kopo 8y ago
    Well put. All the regulation and change Ralph Nader and co managed to make happen didn't take more than a few hundred motivated people - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE People are "lazy and don't care" is dialogue you hear from people who don't have the experience of getting things done.
keithnz 8y ago
my biggest worry is that the "granular permissions" just won't work. People already just say "Yes" to give away their data, this actually seems to make it easier to get to a lot of personal data because people will just say "Yes" to whatever is asked for when they want to use a service.
amelius 8y ago
Why didn't we have these problems back in the days when telephony got started? Shouldn't we go back to some of the core values we had back then? Also, when the internet started, universities and government institutions were inventing and running the internet, while companies were just providing the hardware. Seems like a better model to me in principle, although we need stricter privacy regulation. It seems stupid to hand our data to ... the entities that have an incentive to abuse our data.
Dowwie 8y ago
These projects could seriously backfire in unanticipated ways. There are a lot of important matters to explore in this space by law and philosophy wonks. I think that Solid and the other emerging platforms are more likely to create new revenue streams for those already in the business of selling PII than helping individuals protect and manage their PII. If each of us can control personal information about ourselves, the Supreme Court may rule in favor of this information as property. The problem is that this is not a realistic scenario. Most of our personal information involves parties other than ourselves. Counterparties can rightfully stake a claim to information they helped to create. Why wouldn't they? There is no clear breach of ethics by doing so. So, let's assume the world adopts Solid pods to manage this data. Is each pod really a single source of truth? Any pod organized by an individual could just as easily be created by a counterparty, with some modification. Then, suppose a marketplace exists for this information. Who is dedicating effort to monetizing their pods? How will individuals, who work for a living, compete with organizations mandated to maximize pod revenue? Both have legal claims. My prediction is that contrary to what Lee, Pentland [2], Mazzucato [3] and others envision, Solid and its growing number of equivalents will spawn a new generation of business models and go even further than they do now, by introducing financial products linked to monetization. The main beneficiaries are those already monetizing personal information and those who will securitize them. [1] https://enigma.co/ https://enigma.co/ [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611489/lets-make-private-data-into-a-public-good/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611489/lets-make-private-...
miguelmota 8y ago
The average person prefers convenience over decentralization because ‘it just works’. Decentralized services right now are slower and harder to use so I don’t see it take off until the usability and performance becomes just as comparable to centralized services
erfgh 8y ago
Not solid. To build a good user experience you need to have end-to-end control. If you don't control the hardware your product will suck.
rmkoek 8y ago
I'm still not sold on this idea. I ask why help John/Jan Doe Net Shopper protect their data? If Net Shopper X is that concerned about said issue a little research and implementation a Net Shopper X can privately and securely shop. However my constituents feel it's our obligation to use our skills and knowledge to help Net Shopper X because they are to stupid to do it themselves. Like a Shepard needs to protect the sheep from the wolves. So at this time its still just conversions rather then actions in my circle.
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 Tim, 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.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
I enjoyed listening to Tim and others talking about systems like Solid at the 2016 Decentralized Web Conference. I liken projects like Solid to be similar to permissioned blockchain where small groups (people or organizations) use a private platform with lighter weight consensus algorithms than proof of work. Success can be had for small focused communities if there is enough value for users. After trying to get friends and family to use a private Apache Wave instance for shared communication, and failed due to lack of interest on their part, I now don’t underestimate how difficult it is to move people off of centralized platforms.

291 points by okket 8y ago

dustingetz 8y ago

Can anyone name one for-profit company that wants to build software on Solid?

Waterluvian 8y ago
The concept excites me. I want companies to sell software for a dollar value. That's what solid leaves open as the one remaining business model. You can't use my data so you're just selling an app for five bucks or whatever. With the runaway success of microtransactions, I doubt this interests many. You can even see it in gaming. Spend $100 on Assassin's Creed and it still wants you to cough up $10 for exp boosts.
- mrep 8y ago
  > With the runaway success of microtransactions What are you talking about?
  - unmole 8y ago
    I'm guessing he was talking about the revenue model of the most profitable mobile games.
    - luckystarr 8y ago
      Especially the fact that it's working.
TACIXAT 8y ago
I don't think that's a great mark of success early on.
- dustingetz 8y ago
  I've been reading about solid for three years now and there's nothing. In 1992, the Web was doubling every 3-4 months according to Weaving the Web by Tim Berners Lee page 66 which I happen to have sitting on my desk. Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94. Solid has nothing.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > Mosaic was founded in '93 and Netscape in '94 Only Netscape is a for-profit company, and it took 3 years of the Web existing to be founded.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
codingdave 8y ago
Why does it have to be a for-profit company?
- nine_k 8y ago
  To be able to hire good engineers to work on Solid full time.
- dustingetz 8y ago
  you’re right, it’s a good question. my instinct is that markets get to the truth about what people need or want sufficiently to pay for. there’s a lot of virtue signaling and lip flapping bs to cut through in the dweb space.
kromem 8y ago
It's not like the early Internet was a haven of for profit companies in the early days. Early on most of the profit was in providing the access, not the content.
- seanhunter 8y ago
  This would be competing against the existing internet though, where there are a lot of for-profit companies fuelling the content (for the consumer). If I'm a business I need to decide whether to back a scrappy startup infrastructure with no users or to go with the established internet with a vast potential customerbase. If I'm a user I need to decide between the existing internet with vast swathes of content and huge numbers of different services and this new network with better protections for my privacy but basically none of the above. The early internet was innately disruptive and extremely different from anything that was there before. This doesn't have that advantage as far as I can see.
- dustingetz 8y ago
  there doesn’t need to be a haven, i only asked for the name of a single entity!
gibsonf1 8y ago
graphMetrix.com - Solid service to support business customer data launching in the next 2 months.
lvs 8y ago
Is that a remotely important question? You couldn't have answered such a question on ARPANET, or more pertinently when TimBL was at CERN. You're one of those people who thinks the internet was built by for-profit companies, and therefore you're one of the people who doesn't know any history.

tareqak 8y ago

Given the tendency for wealth and power to concentrate, is it possible to design a competitive, and efficient system where all the actors are sufficiently prosperous without the formation of any monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies? Edit: a follow-up thought. If the answer is no or "it's too hard", then is it possible have something along the same lines, is it possible for the proposed system to self-correct away from monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies should they form?

mLuby 8y ago
Your second point is the critical one, and I'll add to it — there must be an incentive to decentralize, and it must outweigh the numerous incentives to re-centralize. We need to centralize around protocols/standards and decentralize ownership of data. If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law…
- tareqak 8y ago
  Yeah, it probably more realistic (and possibly even ideal in its own way) to assume that obtaining the desired equilibrium will always be an adversarial process. Having proven ways to measure the dominance of each actor or having canaries / alerts is important, but not enough: there has to be ways to measures detect if anyone has subverted, gamed, or compromised the measures themselves.
- lovemenot 8y ago
  >> If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law… Dave and I agree with your diagnosis, and we would like to propose a solution. Who is Dave? Well you know him, and I know that you know him and I know that when we both talk about Dave we must be talking about the same person. (mLuby I probably don't really know you, this is just a hypothetical). A casual observer could not approach our common understanding by adding more data. There's so many Daves after all. In fact they'd need to subtract all but the right data. So the solution is a protocol in which increased data adds noise faster than it adds signal. Such a protocol requires 1000s times more plausible yet incorrect noise for every signal. Digital chaff.

debacle 8y ago

Isn't this plan the same as the last plan (the name of which I can't even remember - app something. There was a kickstarter), just with Tim Berners-Lee's name attached to it? My main concern is that this project is DOA for the same reason that the last few have been - too much of an academic focus tending towards navel-gazing, not enough network effect to draw hobbyists, and zero money to attract businesses. The PDS needs to be a personal cpanel. Something with powertools for the enthusiast but enough shiny for the tech hipsters to use it even if they don't know why. It needs to be designed with an Apple-like mindset from end to end, and willing to make fundamental and architectural compromises (or sacrifices) for user aesthetic. That probably wont happen. If the effort around this was instead used to make something like Mastodon better, we might see much more widespread adoption of that platform. You could probably find non-profit funding for sufficient centralized infrastructure to kickstart a healthy mesh network.

gnfurlong 8y ago
Node-solid-server is just one implementation of the spec. There's nothing stopping another implementation from having a cpanel like management interface.
- gibsonf1 8y ago
  I'm going with SBCL Lisp and Allegrograph and Caveman. Anyone interested in teaming up on the Solid Lisp library? cl-solid
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    Count me in. My email is in my profile. As much as I like AllegroGraph (and I wrote a book using AllegroGraph) if you want people to be able to install your project easily, then using SQLite, or something similar, might make it easier for people try try it out.
    - gibsonf1 8y ago
      Great Mark, Agreed - the cl-json library will handle all the Solid standards and then developers can layer on top of that their preferred db etc. I'm not sure if we need a db for the core library or not...

jacquesm 8y ago

Obligatory cynical comment: It won't work. For the simple reason that if it is successful commerce will find a way in. A large enough group of people will always be marketed to in one way or another. And once that happens the budgets will follow and before you know it you are in the next phase of centralization. I would not know of a way to side-step this effect, unless the plan is to create something that only few people will ever use. The internet already is for everyone - everyone with an internet connection, that is - and that is precisely the problem. So unless you are willing to drastically limit the influx of users sooner or later there will be a swing back to centralization, for instance by companies that require you to give up some of your rights in exchange for hosting your data. And then you are more or less back to today, only with lots of little data-stores that can be merged at will by whoever controls the storage facility after you cough up your keys in return for something shiny.

Kostchei 8y ago
It's not about avoiding marketing. It's about ownership and control. If I want my stuff to be analysed- I let that happen- it finds business or social matches- awesome. I just need the option to turn that off for things I don't want greped- like banking. I too am in favor of paid for services. Because that is what happens eventually. You pay for it. I'd rather make a decision and choose who I pay, as opposed to having my choices and VIEW-OF-THE-WORLD limited because everything is "free" but funded by marketing.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  I would love to 'own' all my data. But companies offering services will win out because they do not have to play nice with you or your data store. Take Gmail, Facebook or Google docs as examples. In principle that's your data. But Gmail has successfully convinced people that Google is able to run its mail service better than you or your corporation ever could. In return for 'reading your mail', and vast amounts of corporations and individuals seem to believe them. Ditto for Facebook and yet another encore for Google docs. Once established economies of scale and network effects will do the rest. A new system would have to fix a lot more than just the security angle because it is well known that security is always going to be secondary to convenience, a factor that large entities will find much easier to control than many small ones. So, I really hope they will manage but I'm not going to hold my breath until they do. Note this comes from a guy that does not have a Facebook account, no smartphone, runs his own web and mail server.

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zsck 8y ago

A lot of folks seem to think this kind of technology needs to be marketed or launched the way a hip Silicon Valley startup should be. I understand how the argument that critical mass is the necessary ingredient for success would appeal to people, but it’s not like the Internet succeeded that way. In fact, it’s probably better if foundational technology like this is developed and grown more slowly and deliberately. I have no idea if solid will take off the way the web has, but it stands a fighting chance. More than being a “viable competitor” to the web, it needs to be a platform that people want to develop for. As with the web, cloud and mobile ecosystems, the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. If you want to see something like solid take off, play around with it for a bit. Try making it go and share your experience.

egonschiele 8y ago
> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
- true_religion 8y ago
  I think you may be in a bubble. Many developers like apple, and facebook enough to work for them. In fact, its that which keeps both platforms viable in the face of stiff competiton and shallow moats.
  - skosch 8y ago
    You're talking past each other: contributing to the App Store isn't the same as working for Apple.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Facebook has a shallow moat? People only use it at all because of the network effect. And Apple's main draw is the large number of affluent customers. They'll have developers as long as they have those users, whether the developers like it or not. Which is why they can get away with charging 30% to developers when platforms have historically given incentives to developers to develop for their platform.

gibsonf1 8y ago

It seems the author is missing the point in advocating big government solutions and government regulation to somehow fix the privacy problem. Imagine if you owned and controlled all your email vs. gmail reading it all? For companies, owning their proprietary data is an enormous market. I'm planning to launch a Solid service on top of Allegrograph in the next month or two to service my business customers.

wmf 8y ago
I don't think they're missing anything. The article mentions that even though you "own" your data in Solid, companies will still cajole you into "consenting" for them to data-mine it.
- gibsonf1 8y ago
  For the email example, people will have a choice of paying a small amount for a cross-platform private/encrypted UX service, or free by allowing a company to read and datamine all of their email. I'm guessing a surprising number of people will pay a small amount for privacy given how badly things are going in the silos today. And that UX service can easily import a users entire email history from google and others, and then use the graph to expose relationships and browsing not currently available in google and other services.

PhilWright 8y ago

The problem with your personal data store is that it will be impossible to stop the large companies like Google/Facebook from simply copying and caching a copy of all the data they need to access. You give them permission to handle your email and calendar information and bingo, they have a copy of your entire set of emails and appointments. If you use multiple services from Google/Facebook then they will end up with a good copy of your entire dataset and can mine it of value just like they already do.

gibsonf1 8y ago
On the other hand, what would stop the rise of email UX companies that provide a PAID service that links to your email with the explicit promise of never caching it? They wouldn't need to mine it to make money as google does, as they are being paid, even though the per user cost payment could be quite low to support a profitable email UX company.
- bostonvaulter2 8y ago
  How could you prove/trust that they never cache the data? I think the only way is if the "app" actually ran on your PDS (Personal Data Store) instead of somewhere else. Of course that brings other challenges.
  - cma 8y ago
    Ideally you'd pay them and that would be part of the contract. Otherwise demand a legally enforceable promise (via promissory estoppel).
    - shareometry 8y ago
      I also think there is a need to figure out how to enable community-controlled SaaS platforms in addition to this. LibreOffice, for example, has essentially released an online office suite. But it has decided not to actually operate and offer this suite to the public in ready-to-use fashion. From what I understand, it is just too difficult and resource-intensive to do that. So it's up to companies running paid platforms to do it (or you can spin it up on your own server/instance and run it yourself). There's nothing inherently wrong with this. But it seems to me that there's a "next step" to take by figuring out how to enable fully community-controlled platforms so that a project like an open source G Suite (running at scale with an iron-clad privacy guarantee that is backed by community audits) that you can just go create an account on could become a reality one day. This seems like it would require a non-profit organization akin to Mozilla. How great would it be to have a community-controlled non-profit organization operating a trusted cloud platform, perhaps even audited by a group like the EFF? Very challenging, for sure. But it seems humanly possible.

croisillon 8y ago

"redecentralize founder" writing a post on medium.com, oh the irony

drngdds 8y ago
It's like everyone forgot you can host your own blog
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  It drives me nuts when friends and associates write long form content on other people’s/organization’s platforms. The purpose of FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, etc. should be as a place to put a link to your content in your own domain.

edhelas 8y ago

By reading the Solid website I was wondering if it was not basically what OpenID tried to offers 10 years ago? https://openid.net/what-is-openid/ https://openid.net/what-is-openid/ > OpenID allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords. > You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit. Is Solid having the NIH syndrome?

frabcus 8y ago
There are some similarities. But the key difference are: 1) Solid is designed for you to store large, complete sets of data you care about over the protocol. OpenID is mainly about identity, and the associated bits of metadata are small and can't be written to by the OpenID protocol. 2) Solid separates the data storage from the application provider. So all your data could be in your Solid personal data store, and none in the application provider. (This was normal on Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, so think of it as a cloud version of that model of application development / data storage). This is a high level quick answer - correct me if I've misrepresented something. Quickly looking there are lots of OpenID-related standards that I've never read or used, and I bet some write data!
- Vinnl 8y ago
  In that sense, I think it's more like https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/

honestoHeminway 8y ago

It will not work out - as long as there is no eocsystem whos central financial motivation is to provide a counter-trend to centralization and control, as wished for by every manager ever.

xtf 8y ago

I would be happier in a decentralized network staying connected with other sheeple and have my own options of sharing information. This is an attempt to doom it before it was even tried.

drasticmeasures 8y ago
Facebook / gov can import all your data from Solid, rendering your options of who to share info with a cruel illusion.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

The man deserves credit of course for helping create the first browsers and promoting the early web and his work for W3C. However, Tim's track record is not great when it comes to backing new versions of the web. E.g. Semantic Web never happened and arguably this is his latest attempt at flogging that dead horse. So, my prediction is that this won't get very far. It seems the website is a bit hand-wavy on the actual substance or vision and from what I'm seeing there's not actually a lot there. This looks like a research prototype to me. I like the idea of decentralized as much as the next geek. However, there's a tendency of complex decentralized stuff being something that normal people don't really grasp or see the value of. Also, a lot of this value is not very tangible or even real. Most p2p systems have a hard time competing against a well run centralized system. A lot of these decentralized Facebook/Twitter alternatives are being populated by people that, well, aren't that social. If you are like that, the empty room problem (you have no friends until world + dog joins) is not a big problem. You might even consider that a feature and not a bug. However, solving the empty room problem really is the key problem for social networks. How do you get all the social media whores, self pro-claimed influencers, etc. from endorsing your super duper decentralized platform and wanting to be there? Mostly that never happens.

hutzlibu 8y ago
"Mostly that never happens. " Might be because there are no decentralized competitors to facebook, who offer the same possibilities bugfree. Never seen that.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Same isn't good enough. You need a killer app to get people to switch.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    When you offer the same technical possibilities, but coorporation free, that is enough difference to get a critical mass of people to join. Signal for example still can't compete with WhatsApp on everything, but is good enough now to get some traction.

ElBarto 8y ago

In my view Solid is trying to provide a technical solution to a problem that isn't technical. The internet and web are already decentralised technical solutions. But self-hosting is not a feasible solution for people and network effects mean that they'll gravitate to a few platforms. That's simply the way it is. Google, Facebook, etc. naturally emerged and similar near-monopolies will emerge with any other technology providing a decentralised network, including Solid.

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yason 8y ago

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices. What I'm worried about is actively preventing decentralized, small-scale or hackership services. If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR, or I can't host my own email server, or serve HTTP out of my home box, or get decent bandwidth for a private virtual network, Tor, I2P or IPFS while Netflix works at full speed, or do about anything else than initiate HTTP/HTTPS connections to known big company grade services or be flagged as a malicious endpoint, then there will not be a decentralised network living within the same infrastructure as the centralised behemoths. And that is the death people are talking about. A marginal decentralised segment of the current internet is still larger than the whole decentralised internet in its early years. As long as the old ways of networking can live, develop, and grow along with the FANG & co that's fine. But it might not be taken for granted, eventually.

Juliate 8y ago
"People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let the King and nobles be educated, decide, rule them and govern the country." could have said many 3 centuries ago. Cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association. "Because freedom of association necessarily recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organisation, aside from the government, it has been a primary target for repression by all dictatorial societies." And that freedom is rather young (19th century). Hosting/owning data and the processes on them is no different as an exercise of sovereignity. At this point, today, it's more a matter of law (it must be recognized and guaranteed) than a matter of ability (it's possible) or market (it exists). That's where the battle is.
- kopo 8y ago
  Well put. All the regulation and change Ralph Nader and co managed to make happen didn't take more than a few hundred motivated people - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE People are "lazy and don't care" is dialogue you hear from people who don't have the experience of getting things done.

keithnz 8y ago

my biggest worry is that the "granular permissions" just won't work. People already just say "Yes" to give away their data, this actually seems to make it easier to get to a lot of personal data because people will just say "Yes" to whatever is asked for when they want to use a service.

amelius 8y ago

Why didn't we have these problems back in the days when telephony got started? Shouldn't we go back to some of the core values we had back then? Also, when the internet started, universities and government institutions were inventing and running the internet, while companies were just providing the hardware. Seems like a better model to me in principle, although we need stricter privacy regulation. It seems stupid to hand our data to ... the entities that have an incentive to abuse our data.

Dowwie 8y ago

These projects could seriously backfire in unanticipated ways. There are a lot of important matters to explore in this space by law and philosophy wonks. I think that Solid and the other emerging platforms are more likely to create new revenue streams for those already in the business of selling PII than helping individuals protect and manage their PII. If each of us can control personal information about ourselves, the Supreme Court may rule in favor of this information as property. The problem is that this is not a realistic scenario. Most of our personal information involves parties other than ourselves. Counterparties can rightfully stake a claim to information they helped to create. Why wouldn't they? There is no clear breach of ethics by doing so. So, let's assume the world adopts Solid pods to manage this data. Is each pod really a single source of truth? Any pod organized by an individual could just as easily be created by a counterparty, with some modification. Then, suppose a marketplace exists for this information. Who is dedicating effort to monetizing their pods? How will individuals, who work for a living, compete with organizations mandated to maximize pod revenue? Both have legal claims. My prediction is that contrary to what Lee, Pentland [2], Mazzucato [3] and others envision, Solid and its growing number of equivalents will spawn a new generation of business models and go even further than they do now, by introducing financial products linked to monetization. The main beneficiaries are those already monetizing personal information and those who will securitize them. [1] https://enigma.co/ https://enigma.co/ [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611489/lets-make-private-data-into-a-public-good/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611489/lets-make-private-...

miguelmota 8y ago

The average person prefers convenience over decentralization because ‘it just works’. Decentralized services right now are slower and harder to use so I don’t see it take off until the usability and performance becomes just as comparable to centralized services

erfgh 8y ago

Not solid. To build a good user experience you need to have end-to-end control. If you don't control the hardware your product will suck.

rmkoek 8y ago

I'm still not sold on this idea. I ask why help John/Jan Doe Net Shopper protect their data? If Net Shopper X is that concerned about said issue a little research and implementation a Net Shopper X can privately and securely shop. However my constituents feel it's our obligation to use our skills and knowledge to help Net Shopper X because they are to stupid to do it themselves. Like a Shepard needs to protect the sheep from the wolves. So at this time its still just conversions rather then actions in my circle.

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 Tim, 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.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

I enjoyed listening to Tim and others talking about systems like Solid at the 2016 Decentralized Web Conference. I liken projects like Solid to be similar to permissioned blockchain where small groups (people or organizations) use a private platform with lighter weight consensus algorithms than proof of work. Success can be had for small focused communities if there is enough value for users. After trying to get friends and family to use a private Apache Wave instance for shared communication, and failed due to lack of interest on their part, I now don’t underestimate how difficult it is to move people off of centralized platforms.