Solid

Description

1.

"Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible. It relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols." (https://github.com/solid/solid)

2.

"With Solid, you store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like. But Solid isn’t just a storage system: It lets other applications ask for data. If Solid authenticates the apps and — importantly — if you’ve given permission for them to access that data, Solid delivers it." (http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/)

Discussion

Melvin Carvalho:

"Try not to think as Solid as separate from the web. All web clients and servers already run 90% of the solid protocol. These are just the features inented by Tim Beners-Lee from the very start of the web, to make it P2P (this is all laid out in his book, weaving the web, which is a sort of manifesto, that unfortunately does not gain the attention it deserves). But if I can summarize.

1. The core of Solid is actually the web, web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0. Any system on the web is either already compatible with Solid or could be made compatible much in the same way that linux uses drivers to connect to things. So the starting point of solid is everything we have today. But the Web is an ambitious project, it wants to change humanity for the better, via a giant network effect. The first phase of the roll out was just documents (web pages) because that was needed. I'll list the next phases.

2. The web should be both documents and data. Documents are a delivery mechanism for data. 15 Years of web standards have matured to allow another layer of data to emerge in the web which is useful in itself, aka Linked Data. The state of linked data is that it is very widely adopted with perhaps more than 50% of the web using it already (but normally in a rather boring way). Solid build on this data layer in order to bring much more interesting functionality. You dont have to use this feature, but if you do, the scope of use cases you can cover with the web increases an order of magnitude.

3. The first folder in any web server is called public_html. The web was never intended to stop there. The last 25 years has been a lot of work on private data and also shared data. Solid add a simple access control mechanism powered by linked data to enable you to share what you want with who you want. And protect your privacy. This is a feature that can be used with Solid but you dont need to. You can just keep everything public and the web will work as-is.

4. Browsers are a problem on the web. The idea of browsing says "you can look but you cant touch". The web was designed to be interactive. The first browser was also an editor. This is the concept of the "read / write" web. But since Mosiac is the father of all browsers today, the writing functionality was taking out. Marc Andressen said it was too hard. But Tim know it could be done, because his original web browser did it. So how is it possible? Well essentially you have a save file option using HTTP POST, and the ideas of folders. This is standardized in what's called the LInked Data Platform and is a W3C REC. It builds on linked data and just lets you save your files and data to any server that has this turned on. Its a small change to any existing web server to allow this, and the hope as a w3c REC is that people will start adding it to sever configs. Of course, ability to write also comes with the need for access control, so that is why when taking write functionality you probably want to take permissions.

5. Finally as a popularly requested feature solid provides realtime updates to subscribing to resources. It doesnt need to go in the solid spec, nor does anyone need to implement it, but you can build nice realtime apps with tight feedback loops with this feature.

So in summary, anything you can do on the web today is already solid. Solid the spec just offers more festures, more decentralization and more P2P (as the web was designed to be). App developers dont need to do anything different to what they do today using HTML, HTTP and AJAX. But if you are a fan of decenralization you can start propagating that pattern to clients and servers all through the web, and we'll see the web transformed from the solid / centralized system it is today, to to a hybrid where both decentralization and centralization offer choices for a large user base.

Any system that is NOT backwards compatible with the existing web has to rely on organic growth. This is going to be in almost all cases an insurmountable hurdle. Take a very successful "P2P" system such as bitcoin. It has about 10 million users and is not really backwards compatible with the web (it could become moreso tho). And that's taken 7 years. So any other system apart from a giant like bittorrent is going to really struggle with organic growth. Compare that to zynga's cityville, which is one game on one website, and got 100 million users in one month after launch. We should quickly establish that organic growth is a low impact strategy. A high impact strategy is to "redecentralize" the web. Now of the technologies out there doing this Solid is really imho the leading light. As one person on the team said, "nothing else is anywhere close", and Id agree with that. And what you'd expect from Tim Berners-Lee who has already done it twice before, and knows how this goes. Its still under a year old but the great hope IMHO. We just need a few more programmers to start to get behind decentralization, pick a stack with an ipmact, and get us to the point where it starts to snowball. Tim uses the analogy of the bobsled. In the beginning you start to push, but after a while you jump in and it starts to push you. We're at that point where we can almost jump in, but 1-2 more people helping or evangelizing would speed things up alot!" (fb, March 2016)