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There are simply an army of far better solutions out there. Solid depends on a poor model, but receives the most attention because the leader of it is famous.

There are simply an army of far better solutions out there. Solid depends on a poor model, but receives the most attention because the leader of it is famous. The problem is that if these tools are hosted by someone else, you cannot verify they do not also have your data. Once you grant them access to it, they can copy it, sell it and send it elsewhere, etc. Since, yes, we have decades of experience that companies do evil things with your data, we can easily recognize sharing your data with hosted applications is a recipe for abuse. Meanwhile, there is almost no downside to requiring apps be runnable on a service/storage provider you trust. If I trust my storage provider, I can trust apps won't be permitted to do bad things on my platform. Whether that's a self-hosted service or a trustworthy SaaS, you are far better off demanding apps be put in containers you can host where you want rather than opening up your data to various destinations.

cxr 3y ago
> The problem is that if these tools are hosted by someone else, you cannot verify they do not also have your data. Once you grant them access to it, they can copy it, sell it and send it elsewhere, etc. If you enter a building where there are both knives and people present, then you also cannot prove that they won't stab you—in the matter of what can be done, a stabbing is one possible outcome. Leaving that aside, you don't have to buy into the Solid project's marketing stories about mediated access to your data in order to find the idea to be compelling on other merits. The remoteStorage project has a few things in common with Solid, but they don't lean as hard on the types of stories that generally make their way into marketing/reportage on Solid. At the end of the day, an alternative to the current status quo, where you would have unfettered access to your own data instead of having to ask permission for a copy, would be a good outcome. Solid (and remoteStorage) are sufficient, and that alone makes them worthwhile to consider.
jononor 3y ago
Which better solutions are you referring to?
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  I'm personally fond of Sandstorm (which I contribute to), but any number of Docker-based self-hosting platforms either available to run yourself or sold as a SaaS (Cloudron, Umbrel, Tipi, a half dozen others in development, etc.) solve the problems that Solid solves, "owning your data", without the huge downside that Solid creates, "giving your data to outside servers willy-nilly". The thing is Berners-Lee is a web standards guy, so he wants to solve the problem with a web standard. But a web standard is not necessarily the right solution here. And I think it's unfortunate some tens of millions of dollars of funding have gone to a solution that doesn't really solve the problem.

cxr 3y ago

> The problem is that if these tools are hosted by someone else, you cannot verify they do not also have your data. Once you grant them access to it, they can copy it, sell it and send it elsewhere, etc. If you enter a building where there are both knives and people present, then you also cannot prove that they won't stab you—in the matter of what can be done, a stabbing is one possible outcome. Leaving that aside, you don't have to buy into the Solid project's marketing stories about mediated access to your data in order to find the idea to be compelling on other merits. The remoteStorage project has a few things in common with Solid, but they don't lean as hard on the types of stories that generally make their way into marketing/reportage on Solid. At the end of the day, an alternative to the current status quo, where you would have unfettered access to your own data instead of having to ask permission for a copy, would be a good outcome. Solid (and remoteStorage) are sufficient, and that alone makes them worthwhile to consider.

jononor 3y ago

Which better solutions are you referring to?

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
I'm personally fond of Sandstorm (which I contribute to), but any number of Docker-based self-hosting platforms either available to run yourself or sold as a SaaS (Cloudron, Umbrel, Tipi, a half dozen others in development, etc.) solve the problems that Solid solves, "owning your data", without the huge downside that Solid creates, "giving your data to outside servers willy-nilly". The thing is Berners-Lee is a web standards guy, so he wants to solve the problem with a web standard. But a web standard is not necessarily the right solution here. And I think it's unfortunate some tens of millions of dollars of funding have gone to a solution that doesn't really solve the problem.