They have three sample applications, yet all you can click on is somebody's blog entry. Clicking on the "publishing" app gets you a screenshot of the abstract of someone's paper. It's a single page web site, like all the cool kids have now. Clicking on the top menu items just scrolls the page.

It has MIT and Bernars-Lee behind it, so it can't be totally bogus. If those names weren't on this, I'd assume it was from someone either clueless or crooked.

There's a decent description of Solid on Github.[1] From there, you can see the real problem. It's only useful if the big players adopt it. Which they won't, because it breaks their walled gardens.

This looks like is another try at Bernars-Lee's "semantic web" - hammer as much content as possible into standard formats so it can be machine processed. This is an old idea, and tends to break down once you get beyond contact lists and library catalogs.

There have been major efforts to make that work in the business sector, where it's called "electronic data interchange", and parties want to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and bills of lading.[2] It's worth looking at that area to see how hard this is for even simple-seeming problems like that. And they have cooperation - buyer, seller, and shipper all want that data to flow smoothly between the parties. Trying to do this in today's world of competing closed web empires is much tougher.

The medical data records people have it even worse, I hear.

[1] https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro

[2] https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/