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.
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.
I will love standing in line at my local DMV and waiting for my WebID profile to be approved.
In the good old days, only the Church could publish books, so everything that was written down was thoughtful and true.
But we are on the net so nobody knows for sure.
Voting machines and nuclear reactors get hacked with code - which is just something people say on computers.
Hmmm, a centralized WebID eh? No thanks.
Even the "How it works" page [0] indicates how your solid pod becomes your id.
"In order to prove ownership of your data, you need a way to identify yourself. Rather than relying on a third party, you can use your Solid POD to say who you are. So no more “Log in with X” or “Log in with Y” on the Web — just “Log in with your own Solid POD”."
It'd be nice if it didn't replace one type of SSO with another, but proposed a way that SSO wasn't required at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A->B != !A->!B“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.
The w3.org site describing solid is actually more readable: https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD
I think Solid needs to start with cleaning up their communications as the whole thing is hard to understand.
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.
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.
I, for 1 and super excited to take back my data.
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.