There is no clarity on the scope of Solid! As I see it:
Solid is a specification that allows control (i.e. privacy) of your own data in a decentralized fashion
To me that means: spec + reference impls (libs) + examples. The first is important, the rest is just supportive.
Remove the confusion that Solid is everything between spec and Internet vNext.
- [v] pods are solid
- apps are examples, not solid
- linked data is not solid
And refering to @markjspivey:
- smtp is not Gmail or Protonmail
- activitypub is not Mastodon or PixelFed
They merely use it! A social network, a chat app, a cms, a what-have-you is not Solid, but use it as one of the many, many other things they’ll use.
If the solid project keeps saying " Hey, did you see my SolidThis, and my SolidThat, and how we move to a SolidWorld?", then someone else will just say “Nice, I have this NodeJsThis and TypesciptThat, or WhateverIHave, and maybe take a look later, once my project is done”.
Please help me. Do I see all this wrong?
Edit:
It may be that Solid as I describe it is a ‘tough sell’, as it comes with some prerequisites, like Linked Data, which constitutes a world in itself and there needs to be broader linked data / semantic web adoption for Solid to surf to the top. Plus there are no good decentralized identity solutions yet (but this I see as broader than Solid).
But I see Solid as comparable to GraphQL, a de-facto standard that became popular driven (initially) by a commercial company (a tech giant in this case) and an attached community. GraphQL needed as prerequisites broad JSON and REST adoption and fixed important issues with the latter.
I worked with in Java from the early beginning. They had a full spec, very clean documentation, and a high-quality javascript reference implementation. Let’s look how GraphQL - after years of further development - describes itself:
GraphQL - A query language for your API
Describe your data, ask what you want, get predictible results