Ask HN: Drawbacks of Solid project by Tim Berners-Lee? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Drawbacks of Solid project by Tim Berners-Lee?

16 pointshn175 comments

Solid is a new interesting project backed by famous Tim Berners-Lee. Project is focusing on giving control back to Internet users. Everyone can have his own "container" named POD for data, but data is also interconnected fe. your POD host your images but if someone comments it he hosts his comments, so it seems like a good way of having control but from technical point of view it's not great (one could assume everyone starts to cache data anyway on his side breaking Solid principles).

I like main concept of a project, but I'm also courious of any known drawbacks. If performance issue is not a real problem it seems like nice way to have more control where your data is and how it's processed.

Description from project website: "Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy."

Sources:

https://solid.mit.edu/

https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works

As a guy who was working a lot on improving Android OS privacy. I see several problems here:

- First and the main. How persuade user to buy your solution. Buy is not about money. Buy is to replace existent free solutions. Solid should have substantial user base. Only in this case big players will take Solid into account. E.g. there are a lot of private Android forks and stores. They have no traction. Privacy is a feature. This feature is not very important for current customers.

- Second, it is hard to manage permissions for data access by hands. User should judge is access reasonable for this application. It is complex even in Android case, where every user works with hundred of applications. In web case it is more complex. You will contact hundred of services during visit of single page (CDN, javascript hosting, video hosting, ads serving etc). User will just push "Allow" button on every access request.

- Third, every current technology was created for sharing (or surveillance, if you prefer). Data is leaking through provied permissions. E.g.you give application access to photos, it has access to location. Location is stored in photo's EXIF header.

- It is hard to persuade user to buy something. Here buy is about money. 3d party developers prefer to give free applications. They monetize showing ads

Interesting points.

Well I signed up for it. However, I am not really sure what I am supposed to do with it.

just guessing. host you site with fotos feeds etc on jamstack and enrich html with some solid and rdf tags. rehost on storage with solid enriched http2 jamstack host as soon as available. modify github for windows to work with you solid useflow against gitlab and lfs. use some cdn hosted web workers mean while. i have not read solid stuff. so take with spoon of salt.

solid server i will use will route normal web into ipfs. i like buzzwords.

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