Solid – A set of conventions and tools for decentralized social applications

https://solid.mit.edu/

by edwinjm • 10 years ago

153 46 10 years ago

solid.mit.edu

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

I feel like the description of this is either so high-level that it doesn't make sense, or too close to the ground to really get an idea about what it is.

Is it an alternative to HTML? To http? Is it a set of guidelines for data handling? Is it a web-framework like Django or a framework like react?

pfooti• 10 years ago

Ah, from their github repo:

Specifically, Solid is:

A tech stack -- a set of complementary standards and data formats/vocabularies that together provide capabilities that are currently available only through centralized social media services (think Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/many others), such as identity, authentication and login, authorization and permission lists, contact management, messaging and notifications, feed aggregation and subscription, comments and discussions, and more.

A Specifications document that describes a REST API that extends those existing standards, contains design notes on the individual components used, and is intended as a guide for developers who plan to build servers or applications.

A set of servers that implement this specification.

A test suite for testing and validating Solid implementations.

An ecosystem of social apps, identity providers and helper libraries (such as solid.js) that run on the Solid platform.

A community providing documentation, discussion (see the solid gitter channel), tutorials and talks/presentations.

-- https://github.com/solid/solid

bluesilver07• 10 years ago

How does this prevent developers from still copying your data and storing a copy on their own servers for faster access?

chriswarbo3• 10 years ago

That's a feature of the Web, which allows applications like Google and the Wayback Machine.

If you don't want it copied all over the world and archived forever, don't put it online.

mankash666• 10 years ago

Bah. This project was pitched as a alternative to free-for-all data access. So your answer is silly

Twisell3• 10 years ago

It don't that's not the point.

By what I understand you could choose to host your media on one server in a standardized way and share them via as many other services that you want.

For instance imagine Facebook, Twitter and Dropbox comply to this standards. You put your content on your Dropbox and share it on FB and Twitter. Now with solid if you erase your data on Dropbox its erased on FB and Tweeter too. If you delete your Facebook post, the tweet don't have to be erased as well. And should you want to leave Dropbox for whatever reason you can download standardized data and upload it to a new solid compliant server of your choice and keep link working by simply updating url to your new server. I haven't read the git now but this is how I picture such a stack. And this is definitely the missing link of today social networks in my opinion.

So basically it's about not being kept captive because of the contents you've put in today's social media.

mcphage• 10 years ago

But part of the appeal of the captivity is that you trust FB (for instance) to limit control of your data. If I upload a picture and say "Friends only", I can trust that Facebook won't allow a friend to share it wider. If I just have my data, even if there's a way to specify it's for friends only, there's no limit to the # of apps that I would have to hope wouldn't abuse or mistake that, instead of just one (FB).

justrossthings2• 10 years ago

RE: "Facebook/other apps will just store your data after you login anyway, so what's the point?"

Right now, just having user is data is only 'OK'; up-to-date user data is the real goal. People, particularly every marketer's favorite demographic, teenagers, change their tastes and interests drastically and frequently. Just knowing Jenny liked Justin Bieber when she was 12 is almost useless when trying to market to Jenny at age 15.

Into the future 'old' data will further reduce in value as app developers make up-to-date and other hyper-targeted data more available.

sdegutis• 10 years ago

Some relevant things:

Solid on Github: https://github.com/solid/

Solid server on top of the file-system in NodeJS: https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server

Plume[1]: https://github.com/deiu/solid-plume

[1] Plume is a 100% client-side blogging platform, built using Solid standards, in which data is decoupled from the application itself. This means that you can host the application on any Web server, without having to install anything -- no database, no messing around with Node.js, it has 0 dependencies! It also means that other similar applications will be able to reuse the data resulting from your posts, without having to go through a complicated API.

Ciantic• 10 years ago

Protocol for data sharing requires also a good product. I wish they get one, but I'm afraid this could end up like "Semantic Web", there is very little business incentive to make data sharing between services easy. Data after all is one of the most important assets for companies.

Twisell3• 10 years ago

IMHO thinking of data as assets is what kept many company out of crowdsourcing opportunities.

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap for instance are wonderful example of successful open datasets.

And what are social network if not personals public datasets. Now is maybe just the right time to make them more open.

brokenmachine2• 10 years ago

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap for instance are wonderful example of successful open datasets.

Wikipedia definitely has a nice dataset, but they don't seem like a successful business.

They always have the ads at the top of the pages asking for donations and talking about how poor they are.

technofiend3• 10 years ago

I think the issue Solid attempts to address is ownership of your data, but as people suggest below if the data is readily available via API how much have you really gained? Facebook will simply write a web crawler that downloads all your data because it's public anyway.

What seems to be missing is the web-of-trust component that controls who sees what data and in what context; i.e. your data shouldn't really be public but protected and limited by roles you control. The wedge will then of course be Facebook paying Facebook customers to mine data by subverting trust relationships.

There doesn't seem to be a simple fix for sharing of data once it leaves your system. You can't tag it and encrypt it so only friends / family / whomever may read it, and if you could there's no way to prevent the unencrypted data's use. The only way to retain your privacy is never sharing the data in the first place.

You may substitute Facebook with the name of the datamining and marketing company of your choice.

chriswarbo3• 10 years ago

if the data is readily available via API how much have you really gained? Facebook will simply write a web crawler that downloads all your data because it's public anyway.

I don't really care what companies like Facebook do with such publically-accessible data, since I don't use any of their services anyway.

What I would gain is access to such data, which I'm currently excluded from by their silo's EULAs.

technofiend3• 10 years ago

I hear you, but I do care what is done with my data. We're just different use cases. You don't directly use any of Facebook's services, but if you surf the web without some very strict cookie management I guarantee Facebook collects data about you. You're part of their service even if you're not a customer.

thinkcontext• 10 years ago

The idea is that with Solid like in Facebook you can define how much each group of people get to see. Your close friends can see a lot, acquaintances can see a little, and the general public can see not much or none. So companies would need your permission to be able to scrape in the manner you described.

artificial• 10 years ago

In this example all they would hypothetically need is access to someone who could see the info, the friends in this case. How? Incentivize the behavior. To be fair I'm a proponent of SOLID and decentralization. Controlling things once they've left you is quite a challenge.

technofiend3• 10 years ago

Among other things the reason I quit facebook is because of people who have no problem trading my information for their gain. I got tired of blocking requests from an aunt addicted to farmville, for instance. She's exactly who I had in mind when I said people will subvert controls I put in place for their own benefit. She'd happily click a button that downloaded all my data shared to her with Facebook if it meant an extra in game reward. But do I want to block her from all my updates? Not really. However given the choice of doing that and sharing my data I quite facebook. I realize not everyone is the same.

cocktailpeanuts5• 10 years ago

I think these "open web" movement people are mistaken about what made the web successful.

The web succeeded because it let people connect more easily by removing friction.

Of course the "openness" part was important in gaining initial adoption, but today "adoption" is not a problem anymore. Most of these open web movement people just want to make things open without any immediate, clear, and tangible benefit to end-users. Even if they did, these always come with caveats--inconvenience.

Introducing inconvenience for the sake of making things more open is going backwards, and that's why it never gets any traction.

I'm not saying being open is stupid, I'm just saying it's not gonna happen if all these guys think about is "how are we going to make the web more open?", they will keep building the same shit that no mainstream user cares about.

If you want to make the web more open, build something that provides a unique unprecedented benefit, important enough that people will use it no matter how inconvenient it is, like Bitcoin, or Bittorrent.

formula12• 10 years ago

You are an ISP provider

A social network "connect me" offers voip and is backed by billions in venture funding, including your own modest investment of a million. Its ok.

A new social network arises and people are really into the bohemian feel. It also is a voip except its meant to be extremely high bitrate so that music doesnt lose as much qualify. Its nane is "Life Vibrations".

What have insentive do you have to keep competition fair when you are invested in a competitor? When ventures explicitely pay you to be unfair, what insentive do you have to be fair?

How much can you charge an individual to allow your ip to be publicly available? $100 a month? $400 a month? Forget the days of homegrown websites. The new economy is rising the barrier to entry.

Another example is censorship

Open web is as much about ensuring monopolies and centrelazion of power dont corrupt a very vibrant ecosystem. The web is as American as capitalism. Free and full of opportunity. The second you give a company the ability to say "no", you are now bound to the limitations of each ISP since some may provide your content only if you guve them a reason. And theres cases like the timewarner/comcast merger where they are effectively the same company but the law prevents them having the same name.

cocktailpeanuts5• 10 years ago

If I understand correctly, you're saying open web is necessary because otherwise the world would be a worse place. And I agree with that, I even mentioned that in the original comment.

My point was, at the end of the day you are building something for actual people to use (and not for a few philosophers), so you need to build something that's actually useful enough for people to switch from existing solutions.

The open web people don't have that, they are philosophers who want an ideal world, and there's nothing wrong with pondering about and advocating idealism, but you know what's cooler? A philosopher who can actually change the world by building something people will actually use.

oDot• 10 years ago

I view it differently. The benefit is being in control of your data, and there's not much of an inconvenience. It's up to competitors to implement the standard. The user will just have to press a "move" button.

zdean• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if that's a benefit to "mainstream users" as the original commentator specifies. I think most people that use the proprietary platforms never give much thought to who owns their data or even that there is an issue of ownership regarding their data that would affect/impact them.

justrossthings2• 10 years ago

build something that provides a unique unprecedented benefit, important enough that people will use it no matter how inconvenient it is

As much as I like Tim I have to agree. My mom doesn't give a shit about controlling her data, much less know who has it or how it's being used.

HN, What would be a killer user-experience that Solid could facilitate with it's data-silo'ing?

=> Enable 3rd party apps that use Solid's login to offer hyper-targeted onboarding and pre-fill more account creation inputs

=> Enable background cross-app communication to app's you've given permission to in order to facilitate great user-experiences? Eg. Spotify tells your Ticketmaster app what musicians you listen to, Ticketmaster gives you notifications when said musicians are coming to your town

=> ???

lewisl9029• 10 years ago

For me, interoperability is the killer feature of being in control of your own data as opposed to having it locked up in some private silo.

If you are in control of your profile, contact list and message history data, for instance, you can switch between any chat app that has access to this data at any time and continue conversations without missing a beat. Everyone can use their own favorite chat apps to communicate without having to worry about what everyone else is using.

Lock-in is suddenly no longer a thing.

I think this is the only way to achieve a truly robust marketplace of apps and services that can compete on the strength of their value proposition to users, rather than relying on the strength of their network effects to lock out new players.

Of course, most profit driven corporations aren't going to be eager to adopt this open ecosystem, at least until it gains enough traction that they no longer have a choice. So the burden is on independent and open-source developers to first create experiences on top of this open ecosystem that could be compelling enough to draw users away from the proprietary silos.

I'd love to see this happen, and do plan to build apps that leverage open data systems like Solid myself, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle, unfortunately.

P.S. replikativ [1] is another lesser known project that has similar ambitions, though it only provides the decentralized data piece of the puzzle at the moment.

[1] https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ

banach22• 10 years ago

I love this idea. Imagine you have a bunch of emails and a bunch of contacts that you'd like to preserve. You're using Gmail and for some reason they've put a bad taste in your mouth. If Gmail were built upon these open foundations then you could simply download your solid archive, and hand it to someone else to take care of.

Regarding the complaints about trust; that should be the realm of litigation. We put trust in our licencing of source code. Your data should be licenced in a similar fashion, and if the handler of your data fails to comply then they shouldn't be allowed to operate.

thringsaround2• 10 years ago

? I did exactly this with an entire Google account the other day: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

It's all standard formats. Not sure what else you could want aside from a literal Gmail clone.

banach22• 10 years ago

You're right, but that doesn't include licencing. There's no guarantee that Google won't retain any of your data.

Additionally, there aren't many online services which you can just expect to work after handing them that data.

larl2• 10 years ago

This works for Google, but not everyone.

jms18• 10 years ago

Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.

That's great! A good place to start would be here -- https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fsolid.mit.edu....

It's a nitpick, I know. I view source. I always view source. There a lot of things that made the web a success (the REST principles underlying the architecture, the "a" tag, the non-draconian "error" handling, right-place-at-right-time), and one of them was "view source." And I always view source. And then I pick at nits.

This one advertises "[relying on] existing W3C standards", so I brought it up. I usually keep my mouth shout.

linkmotif• 10 years ago

Cool. Would like to see more! Also wondering how this might relate to or complement a project like IPFS (https://ipfs.io/)

larl2• 10 years ago

How is this different from sandstorm.io?

eitland• 10 years ago

As I read it this is about data formats, sharing and reusability.

sandstorm.io is about running apps on shared hosts safely.

Solid – A set of conventions and tools for decentralized social applications

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