Looking for the killer app for Solid

Yes! I’ve been working toward precisely this for the last year or so at itme (https://itme.company/) - we’re hoping to launch our first POD hosting cooperative this Spring - please get in touch if you’d be interested in being an early member-owner!

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Interesting. I followed you on Twitter. Not sure what a member-owner would be.

Great! Here’s a pretty good primer on coop member-ownership: https://cooperatives.extension.org/duties-of-members-owners/

The idea is that “members” of your coop are ideally also owners with various rights and responsibilities related to the governance of the organization. Our goal is to like to make the responsibilities of ownership within our coop flexible enough to meet our member-owners where they’re at in terms of technical ability and bandwidth to participate in the governance of the POD host.

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I think you should start by explaining what you offer. Why would I need this coop? What benefit does it do that I can not get elsewhere?

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@mthorner what’s your interest in Solid?

A Killer App ?

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Just wondering how much $ ?

@anon36056958 How much are you ready to invest monthly to help me building the team to maintain ?
Do you think we could find 1000 people giving 10$ ?

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I meant how much would people need to pay to Airtable, if any, for a subscription to use Airtable with Solid. The link is to Airtable’s pricing page.

Are you talking about raising a team of developers to reproduce something similar? Wikipedia says that in September 2020 they raised $185 million in funding. I don’t know…but I think that would be hard to compete with.

If you can break things down into small areas or units or components or whatever that one developer could make in their spare time, by themselves, and it could plug right in and be useful, then possibly an ecosystem could bloom without a big capital investment. That I think is a key thing. SolidOS developers are trying to do that and I think they are making progress, but I don’t think they are there yet.

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This really looks very nice. People could easily build their own small applications with it and control all data on their pod. To make this idea fly you certainly need a lot more resources and many template-applications like Airtables has. While you demo the data input side, I wonder how the data sharing side might look like. Assume you have a personal contacts base you
you want to share selectively with your spouse, kids, friends or coworkers. I dont know if Airtables solved the data sharing part, which is the main selling point of Solid technology.

I just migrated my post here, not to polute this thread Ess Table, Airtable app on Solid

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I’ve enjoyed reading the ideas in this thread. This is something I’ve thought about for a while and I think there are two things that need to occur to make Solid successful:

  1. A pod needs to be as easy to install and run as WordPress. As in, most hosting providers support it and someone with a little bit of technical knowledge can do it.
  2. The killer app will likely have its roots in social media and will provide the best user experience. Like with Tesla, it will have to provide an experience that’s better than what existed before it to be compelling enough to get people to abandon Facebook or Twitter. People en masse won’t switch to Solid-anything simply because of privacy or control of their data. It has to be better than what exists today.

I think item 1 has to occur before item 2 can happen.

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I completely agree with point 1. Regarding 2, I am not sure that a killer app for Solid has necessarily to be in a new social media app - but may be related to it.
Idea: at the moment all social media apps use our smartphone contacts to build their/our profiles for ads. Imagine we could store our private contacts in a pod and only give our smartphone, Facebook or Twitter limited and controlled access. In a similar way, we could block our smartphones to share our locations. Solid technology could become a “privacy filter” in an existing environment?

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Limited maybe, but not controlled because once they got data of yours they would consider it theirs and it would be beyond your control.

That would contrast with “beneficent” apps that would play by the rules and only rely on your pod for your data. At first the ecosystem of beneficent apps would be varied from completely beneficent to somewhat less beneficent where the data leaks to maleficent apps like facebook and twitter, but hopefully eventually by convention or laws or maybe even usefulness that will be prevented.

Having apps agree to terms of use is being discussed in the specification panels. But I don’t think that can be enforced in software, only legally after the fact.

Maybe a browser can be invented that can only play by the Solid rules.

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Yes, and that means PHP, like Wordpress. Not Node, not JS/TS. Sorry, bad news :wink:

It would be like a parallel operating system next to the native one. Is that the idea of the name SolidOS?

In alternative Android firmwares like Lineage you can fake an empty address book and grant access to that to the WhatsApp app for uploading it. I like the idea. But then there has to be an implementation for Android and iOS (not PHP).

Not necessarily in media but social definitely. I have an app for ride sharing in mind. Ride sharing is probably not a killer app but it has some aspects of gradual sharing of data.

At first you’d advertise a ride but without personal details. When you accept riders you’d share more personal details, e.g. number plate. And you’d even share real time location data an hour before you meet.

To make it more interesting, you’d advertise the ride not just on one website but on multiple and your riders would be from multiple website. That is impossible today.

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Ha! I’m well aware. Which is kind of my point. Until it becomes more trivial and ubiquitous to install with hosting services or even a NAS like Synology Disk Station supporting it, I don’t see the adoption rate exploding anytime soon. The technology has to become very accessible, and not just for experienced web devs.

Of course, we’re all just spouting our opinions. Nobody really knows what it will take or what that killer app will be, or if it must be easy to install a pod. I’m mainly projecting my own experience and observations on what gets widely adopted and what gets ignored, regardless of how good it might be. And from that perspective, I know it has to be easy and it has to be better than what it’s replacing.

I have started following Solid mostly because it seems like an excellent platform on which to build an app that I’ve wanted to build for a while. The idea came from wondering how to get around a HUGE pain point as a parent. Multiple times each year I need to enter a bunch of personal information for myself and my kids for school registration, school activities, extra-curricular activities, other activities. It goes on and on. Importantly, most of this information is duplicated on many of the forms, even for different activities with the same organization! For example, I have to enter an ‘emergency contact’ for school registration in general, and then again for a day trip registration that the kids are attending, with that same school. This happens for many different data elements with many different organizations.

The organizations don’t share data among themselves, and I wouldn’t want them to. It would be nice if an organization would at least keep a centralized database of my information so I wouldn’t have to enter it in triplicate for different activities but I understand the overhead that might introduce, and most organizations simply don’t have the resources to set this up. So, sending printed forms home for parents to fill in with a pen, the way it’s always been done, is the path of least resistance even if it involves a lot of parental cursing and frustration.

My initial thought was to create a website that organizations would subscribe to which collected personal information online. The organization would build their input form with all the required data, and would ‘bind’ the form inputs to standardized things such as ‘first name’, ‘date of birth’, ‘emergency contact’, and all sorts of other things they needed for legal, regulatory, or other reasons. The end users (we, the parents) would access the organization’s form and would automatically populate the form details based on the bindings (if this is making sense). This auto-population is where I got a little stuck, because the information has to be stored somewhere in a somewhat standardized data format. I had thought that an encrypted file on the user’s device might be a good approach - the user chooses the file, code on the website decrypts it based on the user’s password and automatically fills in the form.

The other sticky thing is that sometimes the parent doesn’t want to permanently give the organization access to their data, or they want to be able to revoke that access at any time (‘shred the physical copies of their data’). Just having a form to submit doesn’t do it - what would be ideal is to give the organization access, like OAuth, that they can retrieve at any point until that access is revoked. For organizations there would need to be some extra authorization given since frequently organizations need to have printed hard copies of data to bring with them, and in case network problems prevent direct access at any point.

Anyhow, at this point I discovered Solid and thought that instead of a user uploading an encrypted file (or maybe as an alternative option) a user could direct the form to their pod. The app (which hosts the forms and such) could possibly host pods as well or it could simply be a broker, reading data from a user pod and presenting it to the organization.

This sort of app would be most appealing to organizations that don’t monetize user data such as schools and other educational institutions. If I’m dreaming, I would like this pattern to become common enough that users would begin to demand it from other sources who do actually monetize. For example, I have to sign up for Pizza Hut online and for some reason provide them with some of my information. If I’m used to only ‘lending’ out my data to schools I’ll be less inclined to ‘give’ my data to these other places and maybe want to push them to adopt the ‘lending’ model instead. Maybe I’d even go so far as to choose a different place to order pizza; one that did adopt the lending model. This could put a little bit of pressure on organizations to change their behaviour.

Whether or not I get an opportunity to start building this or whether it continues to be just a dream, it’s something that I would absolutely be thrilled about if it started to be used.

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Exactly. In our pod we have our complete contacts organized by categories (spouse, family, best friends, work1, work2, providers, etc.) On our smartphone we sync only the categories we want and we establish several filtered virtual address books (Lineage?) for each social app (FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, Google) we have. Most social apps already have all our contacts, but may be this could be a first step to regain control over our personal networks.