[ydlr]

I really don't get why I would want this. I like that the data that brokers have is fragmented, inconsistent, and out of date. That is the only thing preserving even a tiny bit of privacy.

A system like solid would absolutely be abused by police. It would be a windfall for data brokers and social scoring systems.

No thank you.

[klabb3]

I don’t know the details about Solid, but I think one interpretation is:

One of your personal devices is a server. The (only meaningful) difference of the server node is that it is always online, and it’s reachable. This unlocks a lot of use cases - one of them is to be able to receive messages from other people when you’re offline. Another one is to run sync infra for your own apps. Think eg note taking- and calendar apps which you want to have sync with your laptop & phone. This currently requires the vendor to distribute their apps as services, even if it’s only your own data. If you control the server, these things can happen without relying on vendor services (you only need their software).

In this context, your criticism is similar to that of hardware vendors like Apple. Can they snoop on your phone? Privacy is not binary: you could run a Solid instance on a device you control (your own hardware), or self hosted on eg Hetzner, or (for the majority), by a managed hosting company. The latter is how consumer products like Google Photos or iCloud already works – except now you separate the vendor from the operator to change the incentive structure.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Well, as I remember, the thing about solid is it’s a protocol. So, if you don’t trust one vendor, you can trust another vendor or implementation without losing interoperability. So it goes the opposite direction of consolidation because it allows arbitrary storage services to be used transparently by arbitrary services in a secure fashion.

[endgame]

They said that about OpenID and now you have the choice of ~three bigtech ID providers.