
Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-decentralize the web - rapnie
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets
======
b1daly
It’s amazing to me that a huge component of the problems TBL and colleagues
are trying to solve are not discussed in the article, or here: we exchange our
data to access services that are valuable, and expensive to develop to
maintain.

Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the
various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or
“decentralized.”

Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over
how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’
data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero.

This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that
is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to
be found.

It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from
simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from
which they profit.

While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst
the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern.

I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on
everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on
Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)

~~~
inimino
You are making a huge assumption here, namely that advertising-supported
services that cost billions to develop and maintain, and which generate
billions in advertising revenue, would still cost billions to develop and
maintain if they were not generating billions in advertising revenue. This
assumption is in my opinion entirely incorrect.

~~~
BerislavLopac
The underlying reason for those services having both high costs and high
revenues is that they have extremely high volume of users. I'm sure something
like Duck Duck Go has much lower operational costs, even though it's providing
not substantially different service than Google's search engine.

My point is that the cost and revenues are not a function of each other as
much as they're both a function of usage. Once you get a high volume of users,
it's pretty natural to convert at least a small part of that to advertising
revenue, even if doesn't fit well to your platform (cf. Twitter). It takes a
principled decision _not_ to dip into that revenue source -- I remember once
reading how Jason Calacanis was pissed at Jimmy Wales for not wanting to
include ads on Wikipedia.

~~~
yogthos
Compare Twitter with Mastodon Social. Twitter employs 3000 people and it's a
hugely complex piece of software. Meanwhile, Mastodon is mostly built by a
single guy, and a small volunteer community.

Majority of that complexity is not there to make user experience better. I
actively use both platforms, and I find that Mastodon provides a better user
experience in pretty much every way. The UI is snappier, it has better
features for interacting with others, it doesn't restrict the API, and so on.

The main cost of Twitter comes from building tools to monetize and exploit the
users of the platform.

~~~
BerislavLopac
> The main cost of Twitter comes from building tools to monetize and exploit
> the users of the platform.

Which is precisely my point. Or at least one half of it.

~~~
yogthos
Yup, I'm just expanding on that to illustrate with a concrete example that you
don't need megacorps to build these kinds of platforms in practice.

------
Angostura
[https://solid.mit.edu](https://solid.mit.edu) \- for anyone who wants to see
the basics in more detail.

------
jonny_eh
How does decentralizing things combat the scourge of misinformation and fake
news? Wouldn't it exacerbate the issue?

Not to sound like a hipster, but I feel like the internet went downhill when
it went mainstream. That's when there was a huge incentive to take advantage
of people, whether it's spam, scams, or propaganda campaigns.

The centralized control of our data is a separate issue, no?

~~~
mtgx
When did the most "fake news" started appearing? When you could promote it on
one of the most centralized platforms around: Facebook.

I think it's easier to manipulate a centralized platform's algorithms. That
"high efficiency" of a centralized platform is also what's making the
manipulators more effective.

Same with malware makers and so on. It's always easier to do something when
there's a single dominant platform.

~~~
PurpleRamen
> When did the most "fake news" started appearing?

Must have been when humans started to speak. Fake News is nothing new, just
the name is. In the past there were gossip and rumors, sketchy newspapers who
spreaded whatever sold best, and sometimes even satirical things like Bonsai
Kittens
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten))
in the '90s.

The only difference today is that people moved from the streets to the net,
and gossip-snakes have upgraded their game in quality because of modern tools.
But whether centralized or decentralized, the game was and will always be
there.

------
lovemenot
I notice there are semantic web / linked data / foaf folks on board. These
were some of TimBL's past, largely failed attempts to redirect the web's
future.

Is there any published post-mortem on what went wrong before, and why it's
different this time?

Solid has exactly the right vision, but with the wrong architecture because it
attempts to re-purpose those failed projects.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You mean "failed" like neural networks had failed before they suddenly took
over the world?

The popular success of technologies depends on countless factors that keep
changing at a fast pace, and those factors include a great deal of luck and
randomness.

There is no reason to believe that repurposing some basic technologies for
something different in a different environment is more likely to fail than
inventing entirely new technologies.

~~~
setr
If we assume that the previous constructions weren't perfect, and it wasn't
pure luck (or lack thereof) that shut them down, then our 20/20 hindsight
should be capable of distilling (some of) those imperfections, environmental
constraints and perhaps even a root cause for failure.

Assuming this, it would be smart then, to note those imperfections and
constraints, and make a point of not mimicking them when embarking on a new
attempt. Instead of, say, blindly flailing about, rehashing the idea
indefinitely until it accidentally works.

There might have some chance to the procedure, but its difficult to argue that
we can't affect those probabilities, by thinking real damn hard on it, and
maybe even working hard too. But working hard without thinking... I'm not so
sure about.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Of course it makes sense to think about the ways in which specific
technological choices and designs may have negatively affected the chances of
success. I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee has done a lot of thinking.

I just don't think it's justified to rubbish technologies purely based on a
lack of massive traction in a particular environment.

~~~
setr
sure but if he's going to rehash an old idea, it's reasonable to ask why he
expects it to work _this time_ , when it failed last time. If done the
research, providing it isn't a large ask; and if he hasn't, then...

------
toasterlovin
Media centralizes. This is fundamental.

There are zero marginal costs, so media providers are incentivized to spend
huge amounts of money to create the most compelling content so that they can
dominate the contest for attention. This creates a system with winner take all
dynamics. Then, once you have won, you are incentivized to spend your winning
to ensure that you continue winning. One of the ways you do this is by buying
smaller competitors. Hence centralization is fundamental.

~~~
ihm
Ban media organizations larger than some size (or some better proxy). Nothing
is fundamental when you can control the rules.

~~~
Wohlf
Companies like Sinclair would probably love that, they can more easily control
lots of small, key media companies.

------
mikedilger
Can anyone explain how Solid [https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)
compares to (or relates to) Mastodon
[https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/) ? They seem to have the
same goals.

~~~
Torgo
mastodon is only federated microblogging. The Solid webpage suggests address
and contact management, file sharing, article publication and web annotation.

~~~
etherealG
The protocol underneath mastodon can do all that too. I’d like to see
federation with existing decentralised protocols with similar intent.

------
Animats
Here's a somewhat related question on peer to peer systems.

Is there peer to peer VoIP that works? Discovering the other end isn't a
problem; this is chat for a game, so there's a way to tell the other end about
IP addresses and such. The question is whether you can reliably set up a VoIP
connection between N known endpoints, including proper echo suppression and
conference bridging, without a central server. Are the issues of getting
through firewalls with cooperation from both sides solved? Is there anything
that works well enough that non-technical users can use it reliably?

~~~
ralusek
Isn't that what WebRTC does?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Somewhat, but in practice, WebRTC punts half of the problem to the site's own
code. That's why some sites using WebRTC work great almost everywhere, and
others seem to work great as long as you're not on any kind of unusual
connection/firewall/proxy.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
WebRTC behaves properly until you support multiple browsers. Then it becomes a
nightmare to maintain.

------
nimbius
Does this solution entail DNS roots outside of ICANN's purvey? The United
States regularly seizes private domains under abusive legislation similar like
the DMCA. in many other cases such as Wikileaks, private corporations simply
casually agree to the US Governments demand to rescind registration.
[https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-
knocked-off-net-dns-everydns)

------
princekolt
Does anyone have some links on Solid that aren't media articles? I can't find
anything, not even in Tim's homepage.

~~~
madrox
Home page: [https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)

~~~
westurner
Spec: [https://github.com/solid/solid-spec](https://github.com/solid/solid-
spec)

Source: [https://github.com/solid/solid](https://github.com/solid/solid)

...

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679)
(
[https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679](https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679)
)

> _ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams /Salmon, and OpenSocial) are
> all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money
> (which spammers/scammers are wasting)._

> _Know what 's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan
> spec and also schema.org/Action._

Mastodon has now supplanted GNU StatusNet.

------
greglindahl
Amusingly, the Solid website's SSL cert isn't compatible with centos 7, either
curl or Python. Which is kinda the state of web security in a nutshell,
sometimes.

I wanted to run my web metadata extractor on it, but there isn't any metadata
there anyway. Which is kind of fun for a project about web metadata.

~~~
extra88
I’m on mobile so I can’t fully inspect the cert but since it’s hosted at MIT,
my guess is the Comodo-backed cert is though Internet2. The site maintainer
probably neglected to include the intermediate cert which is fine for many
browsers because they cache those but is a problem for some.

~~~
greglindahl
Yeah, I think Qualys is agreeing with you, they say the chain is incomplete:

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=solid.mit.edu)

------
chrisparton1991
The only commits from Tim himself are some documentation and a typo fix:
[https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl](https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl)

The project doesn't look particularly active from a commit standpoint, though
I can imagine a whole lot of non-implementation work has to be done.

Best of luck to Tim and the Solid team!

------
rasz
Will he officially support EME DRM in this new platform? You know, for the
good of the web, or something.

------
shalabhc
Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the
important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac#](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac#)

~~~
hinkley
There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. The closest analogs I
know of are, ironically enough, tools for software developers.

We can take this farther. There are a lot of people trying to raise the bar on
development tools and at least some of us believe that people tend to do what
they know. What is demonstrated for them.

Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with
them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level.

There are several aspects of code comprehension that I think would be
conducive to his designs. And monitors are getting wide enough now that we
nearly have the space to do them.

~~~
jancsika
> There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild.

Go to Ted Nelson's Wikipedia page and mouse over the "Project Xanadu" link.

> Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things
> with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level.

The value of Wikipedia page previews has very little to do with the quality of
the technology. The quality of the technology is perfectly adequate for at
least one version of what Ted Nelson is describing.

The value is determined by what those tooltips are legally allowed to link--
can they show all primary documents which anyone on HN can trivially discover
and access in a digital format, or can they merely show other Wikipedia pages?

As long as it is illegal to link _at least_ primary documents that whose
authorship was funded by public money (like everything on Scihub), it really
doesn't matter what type of view or even doc format you have.

~~~
setr
that may not be entirely true; if you imagined a universe where xanadu exists,
and was popular as a general tool, then you can envision that open-source
primary documents would be preferred over closed, simply on the basis that you
can actually consistently link to them (in the same fashion that, today, non-
paywalled sites are naturally favored over paywall for sharing on HN).

And if xanadu documents were more useful (because of their interlinking and
history) than the close-able flat documents (or perhaps closed documents that
only link to closed source), then naturally things would slowly trend towards
open documents by default, as it becomes more difficult to constrain yourself
to the closed-source world.

The problem today might be then, that everyone already accepts that primary
documents are likely to be sealed off, and there's no significant incentive
otherwise. But if the idea of having a sufficiently useful document upgraded
from a flat pdf to a historically-archiving xanadu document...

------
na85
Seems like a great idea that won't go anywhere. Consider: Solid has to fight
the network effects and the marketing/lobbying budgets of all the major
players including Google, Facebook, et al., all of whom have a vested
financial interest in expanding their walled gardens, driving lock-in, and
harvesting user data as insidiously as possible.

~~~
kijiki
They're fighting a headwind, for sure, but if the argument you're making was
absolutely true, we'd all be using AOL today.

------
jadedhacker
I had a few reactions to this concept.

1) The idea of a set of reusable APIs around data ownership could actually be
the foundation of a new internet. If it becomes impossible to concentrate
data, the system will be more resistant.

2) The appeal of the Internet lies in the services that are available to
users. A decentralized system doesn't appeal to capitalism, value is best
captured through centralization and intermediation. Capitalist enterprises
produce the bulk of services at the moment. This is a major adoption hurdle.

3) Dr. Berners-Lee appears to be a (digital) anarchist at heart, and it's a
painfully beautiful vision.

4) He is partnering with capitalists to try to achieve an anarchist vision.
This is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is about competition for the
working class (i.e. users), domination and centralization.

5) It sounds like what he wants is a more egalitarian and democratic system.
He might want to talk to more radical political theorists (I assume he may
have already in the decades he's been kicking around).

I wish Dr. Berners-Lee the best. I hope Solid gets some adoption. I've heard
some people are using Mastodon. Here's hoping it's a trend. Nonetheless, if
enough people start migrating, the corporations will offer them something to
come back. After all, they can afford to, tech profits in established
companies are obscene.

~~~
analognoise
"Capitalist enterprises produce the bulk of services at the moment."

All. You meant all the goods AND services. Unless you count the kids living on
a commune who sell berries at the farmers market.

~~~
ZenPsycho
did you forget public schools, hospitals, roads, fire services, police
services, military, medicare and libraries exist for a second there?

~~~
jadedhacker
I am generally supportive of your position, but these are actually organized
as "State Capitalism". They are not subject to internal democratic controls.
Hierarchy still exists though there is nominal democratic political control.

------
MaxBarraclough
Clickbait title.

Not surprising given the source, but I like to think Hacker News expects
better than an "I Was Devastated" headline.

------
loco5niner
Clickbait title

------
XalvinX
Yeah, but didn't Al Gore invent that?

~~~
XalvinX
-4 for a little joke? what, am I back on fucking reddit? I figured "hackers" would appreciate what is, in essence hacker humor that any hacker or computer nerd worth his salt would get. Damn it is hard to find like-minded people on the Internets these days..used to be much easier back in the 1990s......

