Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps!
First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it.
Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore.
There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer.
But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.
Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps!
First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it.
Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore.
There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
Don't keep us waiting, give us examples of better implementations, please ! ;)
I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer.
But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.