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Not saying this is not hard, but I assumed (without having read into it) that the protocol solid itself is much more low-level than that. What you're describin

Not saying this is not hard, but I assumed (without having read into it) that the protocol solid itself is much more low-level than that. What you're describing sounds more like owncloud's level of operation: we host email / we host pictures I'd expect Solid (or any competing protocol) to provide very low-level access to "data" in some form. A third party (let's call them smail) would then provide the service "send and receive email" (to stay with your example, although I'm unsure email is a good fit). Crucially, the value that service adds would not be hosting and backing-up of your email, but rather just the interface and functionality. Ideally, all the data would still be hosted on your pod. When smail does indexing of your email, they load them from your pod (after you granted them access to that data) and do their thing. The difference to now being that at any time, you could choose a different provider that provides a different interface to the same underlying data. As I said, I didn't read into it, but that's what I would expect.

bluesign 7y ago
"Crucially, the value that service adds would not be hosting and backing-up of your email, but rather just the interface and functionality" Yeah but doesn't that create a problem, vendor lock-in. Let's imagine we managed to separate data into 2 parts (which I suppose pretty hard), content and meta-data ( by meta i mean service specific information ) Let's say, if I label an email in gmail, it is meta (service specific data), should gmail store this in my pod? - if gmail will store this on their data center, it would lead to vendor lock in. - if gmail will store this in my pod, in a service specific container. Can they use their own spec? Or will they store this with data with extensions ( XMPP all over again ) Now imagine they chose the second one, I migrated to smail (imagine they decided to go for folders instead of labels), do they have to do some migration on my data? What if I go back to gmail again? Or I decide to use gmail one day, smail another? Tbh email is the most easiest situation here, as it has some kind of global standard, Twitch vs Youtube case would be more complicated.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I think of solutions like Solid more like traditional filesystems. Many file formats exist for things like images, and yet there are lots of apps that work with these formats.

bluesign 7y ago

"Crucially, the value that service adds would not be hosting and backing-up of your email, but rather just the interface and functionality" Yeah but doesn't that create a problem, vendor lock-in. Let's imagine we managed to separate data into 2 parts (which I suppose pretty hard), content and meta-data ( by meta i mean service specific information ) Let's say, if I label an email in gmail, it is meta (service specific data), should gmail store this in my pod? - if gmail will store this on their data center, it would lead to vendor lock in. - if gmail will store this in my pod, in a service specific container. Can they use their own spec? Or will they store this with data with extensions ( XMPP all over again ) Now imagine they chose the second one, I migrated to smail (imagine they decided to go for folders instead of labels), do they have to do some migration on my data? What if I go back to gmail again? Or I decide to use gmail one day, smail another? Tbh email is the most easiest situation here, as it has some kind of global standard, Twitch vs Youtube case would be more complicated.

anderspitman 7y ago
I think of solutions like Solid more like traditional filesystems. Many file formats exist for things like images, and yet there are lots of apps that work with these formats.