How Solid and ActivityPub complement each other best

Use Solid Connection to Other Initiatives
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This is a follow-up to Discussion: Solid vs. ActivityPub.

Solid and the W3C ActivityPub-based Fediverse (discussed on SocialHub and Feneas) have a lot in common. For the future of the Decentralized Web it is very important for there to be convergance of initiatives, instead of fragmentation.

I’d like to dedicate this thread to investigate the ways in which Solid and Fediverse can complement each other.

First note that there are already ActivityPub + Solid combined applications, like openEngiadina (@pukkamustard), Agora (@Smag0), SemApps, life-server and other work, like @aveltens Solid Groups App (see also Groups implementation) lend themselves well to become compatible.

To kick this off here are some points where each initiative imho could learn from the other:

Fediverse 2 Solid:

  • Communication / messaging patterns at scale in production environments
  • Lessons-learned in production environment (e.g. performance-wise)

Solid 2 Fediverse:

  • Data storage strategies that are private-by-default (i.e. POD’s)
  • Enjoying the full richness + benefits of linked data (semantics, ontologies, etc.)

Common concerns

  • Identity (SSO, roaming identity), auth / authz
  • Compatibility (specs, semantics, ontologies)
  • Encryption

You probably have many more, and more detailed, additions to this list, so fire away :slight_smile:

PS: I created this exact same topic on SocialHub (with some links changed in context).

Edit: Note that there is also Encrypted Data Vaults which seems to have much in common with Solid.

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@srosset81 just posted an exciting project: ActivityPods combines ActivityPub and Solid. I’ll cross-reference the corresponding topic on SocialHub community here:

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I have resumed this topic on SocialHub.

The emergence of Rauthy with DPoP support for Solid-OIDC compatibility opens up new possibilities, especially with the complementary existence of Manas.

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