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Thoughts on the solid project decentralized initiative? (solidproject.org)

submitted 2 months ago by catch22@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.ml

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I hadn't heard of this before, but thought it looked interesting, I was wondering if anyone else had seen it or had thoughts about it? It was initially envisioned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee who created the WWW in 1989 and "urges a decentralized web to counter AI exploitation and ad-driven abuse"

More info here about Bernes-Lee's thoughts:

https://www.techspot.com/news/109661-tim-breners-lee-urges-decentralized-web-counter-ai.html

From the website:

Imagine having your own online storage, which you control. You store information once and decide who can access what, when you need services like mortgage applications or medical care.

This is what Solid can do. It’s a bit like carrying all your data in a rucksack (backpack) with lots of pockets. To access the data, different apps can only open the pocket you allow them to open, rather than taking the whole rucksack. The rest stays private.

Solid lets people take control of their data and combine it to achieve new results. It gives creators new collaborative tools while passing power back to users. It’s technology that returns the web to its original vision of serving people.

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[–] Sims@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago

I haven't been following closely lately, but yes, its a cool idea. However, it have almost stalled for many years. Not because of the project, but the idea never caught on with distros etc.

They have kept watching/working on it though, and latest push I think, were a tech-demo distro where you login via the SOLID ecosystem and keep your data etc there. I forgot the name, but it should show up in distrowatch searching for 'solid' - I presume.

I think most sota llm's knows enough about Solid to help with small apps etc for it.

[–] Cyberflunk@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

i joined this hype train in 2018ish. and hasnt done a thing since. shame.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not to be confused with SOLID, SolidJS, or Solidity.

It’s a neat idea. Because of the need to operate on data close to web servers and backend services for potentially long timeframes, I think we’ll need a widely-adopted CRDT solution in order for something like Solid to really take off from a technical standpoint.

And from a business standpoint, there’s really no upside. Sure, you delegate some cost for storage, but compute tends to be the more expensive aspect, and if you’re spending more time to interact with these external data stores, it may be more expensive in the end.

[–] arty@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

I think it has a narrower scope, a standardized way to access data for applications which are simply delivered over Internet. As an example: "I want to have a diary editor, but I don’t want to download and install a local app, and neither do I want some external server to access my diary text". Then you get the running code as a PWA, but the data never leaves your computer (or other trusted storage).