Dumb question: relationship of Solid to The Fediverse?

This is probably an ignorant question on many different dimensions, but as a newbie to this world of users controlling their own data – and encouraged by it – I’m trying to get the lay of the land.

What’s the relationship of Solid to the Fediverse and its apps like Mastodon and Diaspora?

Thanks.

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Not a dumb question, don’t worry. Some confusion arises as “Pod” is a term that is used to refer to a Fediverse instance and the personal Solid data store as well. But these things are acually completely unconnected right now :slight_smile:

Although there are people interested in bringing these two together. (I’m one of those)

Technical background: Solid provides the underpinning so that people can store their data in their own place and give access rights to it to other people and apps. Solid is not really a presentation layer - so you cannot browse things, and there is no timeline that shows you the content from all your friends and people you want to follow.

The Fediverse is a set of web servers that store your data and handle the timeline and all that.

It is entirely possible to create a Fediverse server that instead of handling the presentation and the data storage just does the presentation layer and then stores all the data on your Solid pod.

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You can add this thread to the topic http://forum.solidproject.org/c/connection-to-other-initiatives

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Some more newby statements that may be relevant in this regard:

  • I believe moving your account (including followers, toots, etc.) from one federated (ActivityPub) server to another is still not possible and well-defined. May be a use case for Solid there.

  • The ActivityPub standard leaves authentication / authz to implementers, advises OAuth2, I believe (no time to check now). Another use case?

  • Also the solid-spec mentions Followers and Following as TBD, and these are also part of ActivityPub

  • Solid-spec also has a link Feed Discovery in the ToC for which there is no paragraph text, but these are also AP / ActivityStream concepts.

  • Upcoming PixelFed may have overlap with, complement, or be a competing alternative to what @timbl is suggesting in Photos manage my pictures/images/slides? (and ImageSnippets mentioned there).

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Did you look to the Zot Protocol ?
Specs
Intro

It seems to me that the concept of nomadic identity fits really well with Solid pods.

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If that is the case it would be very interesting to the people building ActivityPub apps for the Fediverse. An opportunity…

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FYI, referencing Github issue related to ActivityPub in node solid server (the label is ‘revisit’ so the issue is not really closed):