How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

What I'm worried about is actively preventing decentralized, small-scale or hackership services.

If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR, or I can't host my own email server, or serve HTTP out of my home box, or get decent bandwidth for a private virtual network, Tor, I2P or IPFS while Netflix works at full speed, or do about anything else than initiate HTTP/HTTPS connections to known big company grade services or be flagged as a malicious endpoint, then there will not be a decentralised network living within the same infrastructure as the centralised behemoths. And that is the death people are talking about.

A marginal decentralised segment of the current internet is still larger than the whole decentralised internet in its early years. As long as the old ways of networking can live, develop, and grow along with the FANG & co that's fine. But it might not be taken for granted, eventually.

I like the idea of decentralized as much as the next geek. However, there's a tendency of complex decentralized stuff being something that normal people don't really grasp or see the value of. Also, a lot of this value is not very tangible or even real. Most p2p systems have a hard time competing against a well run centralized system.

A lot of these decentralized Facebook/Twitter alternatives are being populated by people that, well, aren't that social. If you are like that, the empty room problem (you have no friends until world + dog joins) is not a big problem. You might even consider that a feature and not a bug. However, solving the empty room problem really is the key problem for social networks. How do you get all the social media whores, self pro-claimed influencers, etc. from endorsing your super duper decentralized platform and wanting to be there? Mostly that never happens.

Edit: a follow-up thought. If the answer is no or "it's too hard", then is it possible have something along the same lines, is it possible for the proposed system to self-correct away from monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies should they form?

My main concern is that this project is DOA for the same reason that the last few have been - too much of an academic focus tending towards navel-gazing, not enough network effect to draw hobbyists, and zero money to attract businesses.

The PDS needs to be a personal cpanel. Something with powertools for the enthusiast but enough shiny for the tech hipsters to use it even if they don't know why. It needs to be designed with an Apple-like mindset from end to end, and willing to make fundamental and architectural compromises (or sacrifices) for user aesthetic.

That probably wont happen.

If the effort around this was instead used to make something like Mastodon better, we might see much more widespread adoption of that platform. You could probably find non-profit funding for sufficient centralized infrastructure to kickstart a healthy mesh network.

If each of us can control personal information about ourselves, the Supreme Court may rule in favor of this information as property. The problem is that this is not a realistic scenario. Most of our personal information involves parties other than ourselves. Counterparties can rightfully stake a claim to information they helped to create. Why wouldn't they? There is no clear breach of ethics by doing so.

So, let's assume the world adopts Solid pods to manage this data. Is each pod really a single source of truth? Any pod organized by an individual could just as easily be created by a counterparty, with some modification.

Then, suppose a marketplace exists for this information. Who is dedicating effort to monetizing their pods? How will individuals, who work for a living, compete with organizations mandated to maximize pod revenue? Both have legal claims.

My prediction is that contrary to what Lee, Pentland [2], Mazzucato [3] and others envision, Solid and its growing number of equivalents will spawn a new generation of business models and go even further than they do now, by introducing financial products linked to monetization. The main beneficiaries are those already monetizing personal information and those who will securitize them.

[1] https://enigma.co/ [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611489/lets-make-private-...

Imagine if you owned and controlled all your email vs. gmail reading it all? For companies, owning their proprietary data is an enormous market. I'm planning to launch a Solid service on top of Allegrograph in the next month or two to service my business customers.

The internet and web are already decentralised technical solutions.

But self-hosting is not a feasible solution for people and network effects mean that they'll gravitate to a few platforms.

That's simply the way it is.

Google, Facebook, etc. naturally emerged and similar near-monopolies will emerge with any other technology providing a decentralised network, including Solid.

> OpenID allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords.

> You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit.

Is Solid having the NIH syndrome?

Shouldn't we go back to some of the core values we had back then?

Also, when the internet started, universities and government institutions were inventing and running the internet, while companies were just providing the hardware. Seems like a better model to me in principle, although we need stricter privacy regulation.

It seems stupid to hand our data to ... the entities that have an incentive to abuse our data.

Many years ago, we face the vendor lock-in problem from the software giants, due to proprietary data formats. Thanks to Tim, W3C, XML and open source community, that is less of a problem today.

But now we face the problem of vendor lock-in, not due to proprietary formats, but due to cloud-service lock-in. With all the software giants, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ... offering their services primarily as cloud services, this cloud lock-in issue is going to become more severe in years to come.

It's a new war the software industry needs to fight. It cannot be addressed just by one person, one project, one organization. It needs collaboration from the entire community.

I liken projects like Solid to be similar to permissioned blockchain where small groups (people or organizations) use a private platform with lighter weight consensus algorithms than proof of work. Success can be had for small focused communities if there is enough value for users.

After trying to get friends and family to use a private Apache Wave instance for shared communication, and failed due to lack of interest on their part, I now don’t underestimate how difficult it is to move people off of centralized platforms.

The internet already is for everyone - everyone with an internet connection, that is - and that is precisely the problem. So unless you are willing to drastically limit the influx of users sooner or later there will be a swing back to centralization, for instance by companies that require you to give up some of your rights in exchange for hosting your data. And then you are more or less back to today, only with lots of little data-stores that can be merged at will by whoever controls the storage facility after you cough up your keys in return for something shiny.

This is an attempt to doom it before it was even tried.