[ajacksified]

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...

[PYTHONDJANGO]

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.

[omnimus]

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.

[abeppu]

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.

[Vinnl]

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...

[notjoemama]

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.