20
votes
Solid: From Tim Berners-Lee, a project to decentralize the web
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- "I Was Devastated": The Man Who Created the World Wide Web Has Some Regrets
- Authors
- Katrina Brooker
- Word count
- 3088 words
This article is very long-winded, and I still couldn't figure out what Solid is supposed to be.
I could gather it's something you put your data into, but ensuring that it's yours. So that's a more trustworthy dropbox?
Edit: Just found the project's website. Sponsored by the Qatar government and by Mastercard. This doesn't fill me with confidence, in light of the "We want to stop the internet from being ruled by corporations" claim.
It seems that it's a way to build a mixed "user profile" + arbitrary data storage, which is decentralized. And then this data can be used by many different applications
Yep it does look like an infrastructure project; but it has more momentum than other projects; Qatar + Mastercard give it some mainstream weight.
How is the proposed decentralization different from the existing setup?
What's to stop people from setting up their own server, hosting their own page, running their own code? Is that not the very same decentralization they want?
Momentum. I've done a presentation on the FreedomBox, which is a way to self-host a lot of different services (VPN, Wiki, Web Server, Email Server etc.) and while it's a great project, it doesn't have enough momentum to get more developers and to spread to users. There should be an increase in users and devs over the years but it seems to have stabilized. This has happened to many other decentralization projects and self-hosting projects.
The narrative here may be more attractive to people even if the tech is YADS (Yet Another Decentralized Service).
I understand what you mean by momentum, but even FreedomBox seems to just be a wrapper on existing tools, much like Solid seems to be.
Is it possible that we're using different definitions of decentralization? For me, I interpret that to mean that services are available from multiple sources. Services meaning social interaction, email, file storage, VPN, etc. At the current time, there is nothing preventing an interested party from acquiring a server (physical or rented), installing the OS, webserver, and services.
Is the idea of these "decentralized" web-apps-as-a-service to lower the barrier of entry?
Somewhat related. I can't believe public WhoIs data and paying to keep it private is still a thing. I was 15 when I got my first domain in my name (had one before paid for by a web host I did projects for). And I was forced to have public WhoIs data out there.
I am surprised more registrars don't offer it for free. Some domains don't even allow private registration like certain ccTLDs. Including European ones. Which you would think with the GPDR changes they would have to start allowing private registration for domains like .it
I can't speak for other registrars but I know for a fact that namecheap started offering free perpetual WhoisGuard to all users around the time GDPR went into effect.
It's definitely a step in the right direction, but we for sure need to see more adoption of such practices.
NameSilo has been doing it for several years now.