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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

So, we should ignore Web3. Fine.

But should we ignore Solid? The project started in 2016. Can you _do_ anything with it yet? You can "start a pod", but all the apps are clearly written to demonstrate the platform features rather than to _do_ anything or meet any user need. Of the ones listed, I couldn't actually get any to work with a newly created pod.

https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod https://solidproject.org/apps

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Hi, I work at Inrupt (Tim's company.) Here's two recent examples:

The BBC just announced that they're hosting Solid Pods for personal data, allowing users to control access to their information[1][2].

The government of Flanders is hosting Solid Pods for citizen data[3].

Solidproject.org is a community-led project, but I'd recommend trying out going through our docs at https://docs.inrupt.com under "getting started" if you'd like to play around with it. Feel free to let me know if you have any issues or questions.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-personal...

[2] https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-per...

[3] https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-citizens...

Hi, thanks for responding. I already created a pod from the provider referenced in those docs (i.e. start.inrupt.com). It shows me a WebID url and a data storage url. What can one do with these? What can one do with a pod? The documentation says you can 'view' your pod, and links to some SDKS.

I tried looking at the apps on this page, starting from the top: https://solidproject.org/apps

- MediaKraken: If you click the button indicating you want to use Solid to store stuff, it presents a box in which to put a URL to log in. It won't accept either of the two URLs given above. Following experiences with other apps, I sub in `https://login.inrupt.com`. I can pass through the login page at inrupt, but the redirect brings me to an error page. I can repeat this loop ad infinitum.

- Penny: presents a box in which to put a URL to login. I can't log in with either of the URLs listed above, but it present a modal suggesting I try using `login.inrupt.com` instead. After a couple tries, I can get in to browse and see that I have no content. Yay.

- Solid IDE: I get a 404

- Solid File Manager: After trying Penny, I know to enter https://login.inrupt.com in the login box. I can again browse my lack of data.

- Pod Pro (an IDE for editing pods). I can log in and see that there's basically nothing to edit. I have no contacts, but the files they would presumably eventually go in have some markup which I can mess up.

So far, I've yet to encounter an app that actually seems to do anything useful. Upon creating my pod I was shown 2 URLs and it turns out that none of the apps I encountered will accept them for anything.

I'd love for this to be a vibrant ecosystem of actually useful stuff. But so far it seems like an empty room that's awkward to get into. I think my new pod will be as neglected as my urbit planet, and for the same reasons.

Years ago I remember talking to someone about whether hadoop/mapreduce could help address some problem they were encountering -- but they had neither the data collection infrastructure or data analysis knowledge. It's not that mapreduce wasn't a good tool, but to him of course a framework that can run jobs he doesn't have and doesn't know how to write on data he doesn't yet have was pointless. A framework can need a lot of enabling conditions to be useful. I'm not sure what those are for Solid.

I just spent some time reading about it and visiting the same links while finding some of the same problems. It sounds interesting but I can't figure out what it "should" be used for. I can imagine this replacing existing data stores but it looks like an over complication to me, initially.

If I imagine Facebook backed by Solid pods, well if any social media site is web based, can't they just scrape my data and send it to their server if I plug my pod into their system and allow access? Because they can do that for anyone else that signs up, wouldn't it just be a veneer over me "controlling access to my data"?

The only benefit I can see is having a unified consistent data structure for combining information from different sources, an HTML standard for data.

Ah, I've got it. This is what I was searching for to say.

After reading their site I can't figure out what problem these solid pod solves and I also don't know how it solves it. It looks like neat tech that I would want to play with but that's as far as I can get after about 20 minutes of being introduced to it.

Instead of centralised service users each have their mini server that can communicate with others. As a user you give acces to certain data on your pod to other users. Of course the other user than has acess to this data.

How it is iseful? Imagine notes app or todo app that you download but it works only on data in your pod. The data is not sent anywhere, its like a desktop app on your computer but 24/7 on and you can connect to it online.

> can't they just scrape my data and send it to their server if I plug my pod into their system and allow access?

The answer I usually give to this is that Solid's goal is to be the enabling technology that allows good actors to give you control over their data. Of course Facebook can funnel your data elsewhere if it were to be built on Solid, but it's even easier for them to just not build on Solid and just harvest your data that way. Technology is not a solution by itself, but with the technology available, customer demand or legislation potentially has a viable path towards giving you a way to control your data.

I'm the author of Penny, and you are right: there are only two viable Solid apps at the moment, both by the same author [1]: Media Kraken [2] and Umai [3]. They're good, but pretty simple, and primarily interesting if you're really sold on the concept of Solid. And Penny works, but it's really only useful for developing Solid apps.

The BBC app mentioned above doesn't, at this time, really bring any of Solid's purported benefits (see my analysis at [4]). Inrupt's server implementation still occasionally introduces breaking changes that even the mentioned apps are having a hard time keeping up with, let alone the unmaintained ones.

So honestly, I think the best time to take another look at Solid is the moment Inrupt has a paying customer that is providing a Solid server that is usable with more than just their own apps, and an app that is usable with more than just their own server. Until that happens, it's unlikely that there will be anything that really works and that you can count on will continue working.

And to be perfectly clear, the above are my personal opinions only :)

[1] https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin

[2] https://noeldemartin.github.io/media-kraken/

[3] https://umai.noeldemartin.com/

[4] https://forum.solidproject.org/t/implementation-of-bbc-toget...

Ok, wait, do I really understand this right?

https://docs.inrupt.com/ess/latest/installation/

and

https://inrupt.com/products/enterprise-solid-server

let me conclude that the new, more decentralized, more privacy respecting vision of a future internet is based on an "enterprise" server with no open source code and to use it I need an "entitlement token" sold by one single company?

To login to Inrupt’s private Docker registry and download the ESS Docker images, your enterprise needs to obtain an entitlement token from Inrupt.

I really hope my conclusions are very wrong, because, you know, it reads like a satire.

Mr. Barners-Lee is selling tokens for the next generation freedom internet and talking about why the other guys selling tokens for the next generation freedom internet are bad?

Please, correct me, this must be wrong.

There are multiple implementations of SOLID server https://solidproject.org//self-hosting/css what you are linking too is other implementation that inrupt sells to big corps as a product. I assume it has a lot more functionality for management of users stuff like that. But the pods them selves work the same.

It sucks that web3 marketing has hijacked the concept of decentralisation.

Suddenly privately hosted data, federation, WoT, or P2P don't count as decentralised if there isn't any blockchain involved with a token to sell.

They've rebranded private keys as "wallets" and act as if cryptography couldn't be done without transferring some Monopoly money at the same time.

Monopoly money does prevent spam. In decentralized networks preventing people from DDOSing the network becomes extremely important and very difficult.

That doesn't work nearly as well as you'd expect.

Spammers have money. For them it's merely a cost of doing business and they'll spam as long as there's positive ROI. For something like politically-motivated disinfo on Twitter there are millions of dollars bankrolled.

OTOH any non-zero cost is off-putting for regular users and stifles growth of services. Twitter has upset its top users by trying to change $8!

Then there are flash loans that let you have any amount of wealth in the web3 world for only a tiny fraction of the price. It keeps popping "DeFi" services that naively assumed nobody would risk a fortune to attack them, but there's a fortune-for-hire service!

Anyway, the real-world web has used phone numbers as proof of small amount of money. There are CC checks for bigger amounts. Then there's web of trust which is a pre-web3 word for "staking", except using reputation instead of Monopoly money. Mastodon instances for example ban other instances from federation if they don't police spam/abuse enough, so every server admin is motivated to fight it locally, while the system as a whole remains decentralised.

I think Solid is an awful idea that gets a ton of media coverage solely because Tim is behind it. It still has you giving arbitrary servers access to your data, rather than keeping the apps under your control as well.

I think the only way you end up with really liking Solid is if you nearly paradoxically care about user freedom but really hate open source software and want to ensure you control your app code.

You can keep apps under your control. What are you talking about? It also means you share only part of you data if you need to do that at all.

It gives users so much more control than in current situation.

Why does Solid not let you run the apps on the server with your data?

You can do that, if you want. It just gives you the option to not do that.

Solid is probably not going to happen and it does give TimBL the appearance of a conflict of interest, but if you can put that aside his point stands.

It stands either way.

One can have a conflict of interest, or even be a hypocrite, and still be correct.

I don't think there's a 'conflict of interest' here; he has a startup, was talking at a web conference, and expressed an opinion about the landscape. I don't take issue with his points about web3.

I would like to see _something_ that moves towards decentralization (or at least weaker centralization / greater portability), and if it's not Solid, I hope something else will step into that gap. But I am genuinely confused why there's not at least _something_ useful built on that framework after several years.

Why not both?

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