
Solid – Re-decentralizing the web - Everhusk
https://github.com/solid/solid
======
mark_l_watson
I enjoyed hearing about Solid and other "de-centralizing technologies" at the
Decentralized Web Conference last June in SF.

That said, I think that there is a less elegant but far simpler approach that
I use: I write articles for my own blog and often I decide to license my books
using a Creative Commons license. I then use traditional social media (Gnu
Social, FB, Twitter, G+) to link to my own content.

It bothers me (a little) when I see people putting a large amount of effort
into generating content for platforms they don't own. I personally think that
social media is OK for posting vacation pictures and simple stuff, but for
anything you work hard on, why not have your own content on your own domain?

~~~
chubot
I run my own blog and link to it with Twitter too. Why don't more people do
it? It's more work to do so. Medium, Facebook, etc. actually do a fair amount
of work for you, for better or worse. That is, they do provide value in
exchange for what you give up.

I see two kinds of people for which it make sense economically to own their
own site:

(1) Technical people like programmers. Because of their skills, the cost to
owning a site is low.

(2) Business owners. They can afford to pay a high price because it
contributes to the business. That said, many small businesses choose to use
Facebook or Squarespace as their presence. I guess with Squarespace you own
the domain (?), but migrating out is still a pain.

That probably accounts for 5% of people with a web presence... for the other
95%, getting the tools for free is apparently more important than owning the
site.

------
johnnydoebk
There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem
successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to
implement some elves fantasies.

1\. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers
would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there
is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any
monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale,
Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that?

2\. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah,
that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could
move existing software to a more decentralized model?

3\. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to
build JS SPAs.

4\. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I
mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like
"Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of
creating an abstract protocol?

~~~
mynewtb
The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their
hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a
minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.

~~~
qznc
Has this old web really disappeared or us it just dwarfed by the new web
today?

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
The old web is still there but it is definitely dwarfed by the new web. Search
results are gamed, comment sections are spammed, product placement and paid
reviews are rampant, fake neutral information websites erode trust. Because
there is money involved and access to the Internet is not controlled, some
people chasing the dollars ruin the experience for everyone. They keep
generating noise in their chase of money so that eventually the old web is
impossible to find because most links lead to the new web.

~~~
qznc
It sounds like an interesting technical problem at first. A search engine for
hobbyists. Use AI or whatever to filter out commercial interests.

The problem is that nobody will pay you by definition and you are in an arms
race against commercial interests. Does not sound sustainable.

~~~
jsilence
Remove the cause and not the symptoms!

~~~
qznc
Remove capitalism?

~~~
laughingman2
Yes!

~~~
beaconstudios
haha, stop capitalism - it took GeoCities away from us! Very compelling.

------
woodandsteel
The web decentralization movement hasn't gotten very far as far as adoption
goes. But that is because it is pretty new and the technology is still being
worked out.

There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast majority
of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on to
decentralized ones. What I am hoping is that once the tech gets solid, one or
more people who are good at thinking about ordinary users will come up with
some ways to win them over.

My own thought is to figure out what it is that people value that centralized
services, by their very nature, cannot provide, but that decentralized
services can.

Along these lines, maybe what will happen is Facebook will get hacked,
millions of people will suffer as a consequence, and then people will be in a
frame of mind to listen to arguments for decentralization.

~~~
verisimilidude
> There is a real question, however, as to what would motivate the vast
> majority of current web users to switch off of centralized services and on
> to decentralized ones.

I imagine decentralized tech would creep into everyone's lives by accident,
service by service, rather than happening all at once. I don't think people
care (yet) about how their bits are pushed around, but they'll jump into a
decentralized service if needed to keep up with the latest craze.

------
alexforster
I think WebDAV would be a much more natural fit for this problem. When people
think WebDAV they usually think Microsoft, but it's actually a very mature,
open HTTP extension standard.

RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it's going to take a lot of work to get
this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does-

    
    
      * Locking
      * Versioning
      * Expressive ACLs
      * Expressive search
      * Quotas
      * Simple distributed data structures
    

Granted, some of those features use an equally arcane XML syntax, but at least
there's already tooling.

~~~
EGreg
From what I understand, Tim Berners-Lee is really passionate about RDF because
it helps build an interoperable semantic web. Unlock the data, which makes
sense.

Also, these days LD-JSON exists and is totally compatible with RDF. And in
fact Facebook's Open Graph and Google's schemas.org are RDF!

------
ThomPete
The web already is decentralized. It's literally possible for anyone to create
their own content, platform etc.

It seems to me that these re-decentralizing attempts are really just marketing
in open-source wolf-clothes.

Furthermore you don't re-decentralize the web my making a tool whos value
proposition is just that. Create something which has value, which people want
to use instead of something else. Thats decentralization in reality.

~~~
sharun
People have been conditioned now for a decade to attach value to their
like/retweet/view/karma counts.

It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification
high that everyone is addicted too.

It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social
networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it.
Most that get proposed don't.

~~~
EGreg
That's because the current "social" web is really about announcements and
talking at crowds.

Real social activities are decentralized local things like:

    
    
      * Going to dinner
      * Taking a trip together
      * Chipping in for a gift
      * Attending an event
      * Dating
      * Interacting with one another
      * Forums and communities
      * Group driving
      * Meetups
      * Volunteering in community
      * Helping after a disaster
      * Buying and selling furniture
    

That's the stuff you don't need global singletons for.

You don't need your signal to go to facebook or even AT&T to invite friends
for dinner.

Centralized social networks and governments cause perverse feelings in local
communities where eg democrats and republicans living next to each other
increasingly hate each other.

I talk about it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY)

~~~
eximius
Even 'real' social activities are increasingly reliant on multinationals that
economically dominate their spaces. You don't HAVE to use them, but it is
rarer and rarer to not roll up to a multinational. That is still a form of
centralization.

------
jasode
I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-
Berners Lee story. In any case, I'll state again that decentralization is
really a _" game-theory-economics"_ puzzle and not a "protocol" or "node
software stack" problem. Most software projects and essays on this subject
keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech.

That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the
decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts.
(E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that
framework won't be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized
social over something like Facebook.

In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology & software like
the "fathers of Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of
decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the
"software stack", think about the _economics_. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf
and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the
economics of why a billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack
from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also
economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc.

My theory on why those scientists don't put economics at the forefront of
their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the
internet happened when the entire Internet was _sponsored by the government
and universities_. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be
solved with "technology".

As another example of how "protocols" & "specifications" don't really solve
decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you
read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc.
_The technical stuff._ But there is nothing about how people _pay_ for pushing
SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the "economics"
are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a
computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and _not predict_ that centralized
email like Gmail/Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior.
(E.g. the word "spam" is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of
the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential
internet.)

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-
valley/telecom/intern...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-
valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-
pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web)

[2] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821)

~~~
kuschku
The reason these things aren't discussed is because they shouldn't have to be
discussed.

> their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was
> sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like
> today's problem can be solved with "technology".

As it should be.

The internet mirrors our reality, and our reality mirrors the internet. If we
let corporations control either, we've already lost. We have to ensure all
data is owned by the people, or cooperatives, governments, etc they formed
democratically.

If we let corporations control data, and access to it, and use it, then we
have already lost.

I'll mention at this point Bundesdatenschutzgesetz §34, allowing a user to get
the canonical representation of all data stored about them from any entity
that has data on them, plus a list of all entities they gave data about the
user to, plus info what data they gave to which entity, plus all data derived
from this users data (including probabilistic models trained from the user's
behaviour or choices, for example models for credit scores).

~~~
jasode
_> The reason these things aren't discussed is because they shouldn't have to
be discussed._

Whether one chooses to analyze the economics or ignore it, the fabric of
monetary incentives _is always there_ because harddrives and bandwidth are not
$0.00. Even ephemeral things like "trust" and "reputation" are not zero cost
to implement. Maintenance tasks such as "software installs" and "upgrades" are
also not free.

If those costs (which are never specified -- and can't be specified) in the
technical protocols are not mentally accounted for, it will seem like
"centralization" is some weird illogical phenomenon. One would _incorrectly_
believe that the masses haven't adopted distributed protocol stacks like IPFS,
sandstorm.io, Diaspora, GNUSocial etc because the "technology" is a problem.
If you focus on technology like that, you'll just end up inventing _another
distributed protocol that non-geeks will not use_.

Put another way, you can write a paper specification that such & such protocol
is designed for decentralized deployment. You can also draw out an
architecture diagram that illustrates how peer-2-peer nodes can be federated,
etc. However, all those intentions still have to be executed in the _real
world_ and the real world _costs money_. That is why decentralized
protocols/tools like SMTP and Git coalesce into centralized entities like
Gmail/Hotmail and Github.

E.g. the Git specification about BLOBs, sha1 hashes, etc _does not include a
free $10 /month VPS server_. Therefore, if I want to post a public repo
without having to use my credit-card to pay for bandwidth, I can just put it
on Github. Thousands of people making that similar _economic decision_ leads
to a centralized Github.

~~~
kuschku
But this can not be solved.

The only way to solve this is having a rich entity subsidize it.

And those can only be either companies trying to abuse your data for their own
profit, corporate and noncorporate entities that try to do good (foundations,
NGOs, etc), universities, or governments.

That's why I said what I said. The web can only work if we get rid of the
corporations, or massively regulate them while subsidizing the independent
projects.

That’s why the Prototype Fund exists
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200777),
why the German government has previously funded GPG, why the German government
and the EU have funded work on KDE several times
[https://www.cnet.com/news/germany-funded-linux-software-
arri...](https://www.cnet.com/news/germany-funded-linux-software-arriving/),
why universities fund open source work often, etc.

------
skdotdan
Rule of thumb: if you want people to do X, make people to have economic
incentives to do so.

If you want to make the web decentralized again, then think about how would
you pitch it to consumers and companies, no tech guys like us.

------
grizzles
I guess everyone has their own take on how to do this. (Here's mine:
[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecommen...](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/6697#issuecomment-280750050))

What's missing from many of these projects is the ability to remix / mashup
people's peice of this goal. Imo, these efforts often seem to attract grand
visions instead of utilitarians. I talked to one guy and he was pretty hostile
about me using his _open source_ code in a way he didn't approve.

~~~
pekk
You may be excited about your project, but this really isn't doing the same
thing as SOLID at all.

"within a few months I'll release an open source ML powered browser that
speeds up their web browsing experience by something between 10X-100X" sounds
more grand than utilitarian to me.

Nobody has to change their code to support whatever odd thing you want to do
with it, or even to think that what you want to do is worthwhile. It's open
source, change it yourself. Or don't, but remember that other people have the
right to say "no, I'm not doing that."

~~~
grizzles
If you load stuff from disk vs the web, I'm pretty sure those numbers bear
out. BTW I was happy to write the code, but he wasn't happy to take the pull
request. That's fair enough but it changed my calculations on where to spend
my hobby time so I wrote my own version of his code.

------
peterwwillis
At first I thought this was just reinventing the wheel, but now I realize what
they're really doing: taking what was formally an incompatible, proprietary
set of enterprise solutions and turning it into a set of standards that can
sit on top of any platform.

The big win is actually cross-platform compatibility for user, system &
network management protocols. I don't think the goals they want to achieve
matter to users, and are antithetical to corporate interests. But it'll be
neat to have these protocols work with so many existing systems.

This is going to be a fucking security nightmare, though.

------
acd
I view a centralised web as a similar to à biological system of clones. A few
large cloud actors are running similar systems that are essentially copy
pasted blueprints. Such a system in the analogy of an biological immune system
is vulnerable to diseases. A decentralized web is more resilient because each
node is slightly different.

"Monocrop agricultural systems provide an ideal environment for pathogen
evolution, because they offer a high density of target specimens with
similar/identical genotype" source: Wikipedia

------
vkorsunov
We developing [https://bubblehunt.com](https://bubblehunt.com) \- it's search
platform, where every user can create own search system without coding. And
main idea - web decentralization, you can get information by users, where
every become independent information provider, like miniGoogle. Maybe you can
give us advice, how we can using Solid on our platform?

------
woodandsteel
Anybody know how this relates to ipfs? Is it an alternative, or something that
could be built on top of ipfs, or what?

------
jancsika
> Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions
> and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked
> Data principles.

Try to imagine a set of proposed conventions and tools for building
decentralized (or distributed) digital cryptocurrencies written _before_ the
Bitcoin whitepaper. All the hard problems-- consensus, reducing trust in third
parties, defending against Sybil, etc.-- are outside of the scope of this
proposal.

What are the chances that such a proposal would be not only relevant but also
significantly improve the design of future distributed cryptocurrencies?

This is relevant because many of the same hard problems are still outstanding
when it comes to building secure social applications where the user has some
semblance of control over their data.

------
dang
Related to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125090).

------
alnitak
Where can one find a simple "Hello world" example of an app built upon Solid?

~~~
eorge_g
linked in the repo: [https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-
angular/blob/master/...](https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-
angular/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
0x006A
WebID-TLS authentication failed. is all i get from
[https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/](https://melvincarvalho.github.io/helloworld/)

------
m-j-fox
Sell this to me as a user.

~~~
stonogo
No.

Selling is what got us into this mess.

~~~
laughingman2
Exactly. People harping that this is not "commercializable" miss the point
that selling out of the web is the very thing this fights against.

The creators of personal computing and internet like Licklider were idealists
who envisoned the computer being a tool to expand human intellect.

>“In a few years humans will be able to think as no humans have thought
before”

See the scope of their thinking and that of sellouts who want to commercialize
personal data to squeeze dollars.

The crass selling out of the ideals by the later "entrepreneurs" who claim to
make the world better but have no such ideals other than profits has resulted
in complete mess.

------
hasenj
How about, instead of trying to come up with protocols, just make forums and
blogging sure that are so good that people prefer them to other mediums like
facebook/reddit/twitter?

Make them available to install (like traditional forums) instead of a good
service. And build into them methods for users to liberate their data
and/cross-link their identities from one software to another?

~~~
falcolas
Could take a step back down the technology chain and use email, newsgroups,
and XMPP hidden behind a great GUI.

Not very sexy, but it would be ridiculously decentralized.

Throw in GPG for some behind-the-scenes encryption and authentication if you
really want to knock it out of the park.

~~~
hdhzy
GPG would not guarantee Forward Secrecy. OMEMO [0] is better if XMPP would be
considered.

[0]: [https://conversations.im/omemo/](https://conversations.im/omemo/)

