Decoupling the storage from the application provider would be a huge step forward.

Even if you continue to host your data on Dropbox or Google Drive, you have total control over the underlying data--you can audit, modify, or delete it at any time.

From the application side, it also means you no longer have to deal with persistent state, which means you can ship applications with no backend. That's an order of magnitude easier to develop and maintain.

The downsides are real though: the user experience is often jankier, and the lack of a central database makes it really hard to do anything social/realtime. I'm rooting for Solid but am not yet convinced they'll make it.

In reality apps would keep their own cache and indicies of your data for faster and more reliable access.

So there's an immediate consistency problem the user may or may not have the tools to fix because they rely on the application exposing a bespoke cache refresh. Is this solved for in solid?

wasn't this a problem for http? any private network could funnel traffic through a reverse proxy cache and you end up with (potential) issues. Seemed to work ok for HTTP in general?

It is/was supposed to be a centralized store of your data, so that you can have more control over who has it. Instead of uploading a photo to facebook, you upload it to your pod, then allow facebook access to it to post to your timeline. Then you can see who has access to your stuff and revoke if wanted.

Another scenario is going to a doctors appointment and having to fill out forms with your info (name, address, preferences, medical history and etc)

with a system like this, you can tap into a sign in station and give them access.

Doctors can also send you any documents they generate and it gets stored in your POD.

oh boy the HIPAA compliance nightmare this will create. Sadly there is a reason why every doctor office you go to give you poorly xeroxed form and a pencil to fill it out. Wish that would change obviously.

Not for the folks north of you. I'd be happy with a form & a pencil but for the past year plus I've been told by the less than helpful dr office assistant to "Go to our website and make your appointment" which then makes me fill in various screening forms.

The trade off - clerk doesn't have to spend less than a minute looking up and giving me a time for my next appointment and I have to setup yet another id & password to use their crappy appointment/medical forms app in a cloud somewhere.

Assuming you have a universal API for all medical forms ever. This would be like the final boss of scope-creep APIs

What incentive does Facebook have to support something like that? Zero.

Yeah, that's kinda the issue. Even if pods came first, Facebook has the incentive to give pod storage for free. It's a nice idea, just don't see it taking off.

I also don't see how it's possible to revoke access to your information; once they're given access, there's nothing stopping them from backing up all of your information in their own storage.

Centralized platforms have no incentive to implement this