How will Solid change the way we do websites?

Use Solid Solid: The Basics
#1

Hello All,

This is my first post. I am very excited about the possibilities and promise of Solid. I am not a developer or a tech person. My interest in Solid lies in a) my appreciation for what it can do to streamline the user’s web experience, and b) my philosophical support for the entire concept of decentralizing the internet and placing control of data back in the hands of individuals.

So as to avoid asking a lot of basic questions, I have been doing research and reading articles on the concept. Most of the articles have used social media, personal contacts, and calendars/agendas as examples, and so I am starting to get a good handle on how Solid will change our approach on those. However, I am a little fuzzy on what it will do, or might do, to the way we think of, construct, and use actual websites. Will that change?

For example, let us say that I want to create a personal website using Wordpress—a place to post my thoughts, articles, images, etc. A place that I control. If I were to do that now, all of my data would go into Wordpress’s system. Those data would be stored wherever the site is hosted, in Wordpress’s file structure, in the form that Wordpress needs them to be.

But it sounds to me like Solid might render such an approach obsolete. It certainly renders the current social media paradigm obsolete. So what does it do to websites? Is a whole new way of building websites going to arise out of Solid, such that Wordpress itself might slowly become obsolete, or at least redundant?

I would like to have such a personal website, but I’d hate to build one only to discover that in two years, we’re doing everything differently!

I would very much appreciate any knowledge and insight anyone can provide.

Thanks!
CC

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#2

The change is that you would be able to tell WordPress where to store you data, which could be your own server or some server you trust

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#3

And data and apps are decoupled, meaning you could reuse data generated from one app in another app

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#4

Thank you for the reply. So a couple of questions spring to mind right away:

Will Wordpress be retooled to operate in that way? To read the data it uses from a POD? (Or will it be replaced by a Solid-friendly alternative?)
and
Will it be made possible to migrate data from existing Wordpress sites into one’s POD?

For that matter, what about years of data that we now have on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Do you think that people will write migration applications for those data, so that we can transfer years of accumulated information to our PODS?

I know that I am asking questions about future eventualities, the answers to which perhaps cannot be known dispositively. Still, I suspect that these things have already been thought through by Solid’s cognoscenti and enthusiasts . . .

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#5

These seem to be questions which can only reliably be answered by the Wordpress community.

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#6

Yes and yes. This is already possible for those with a little know how, but it is important and will be improved and made easier in future.

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#7

I am very comforted by your answer, happybeing. I find the possibilities of Solid to be really exciting!

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#8

Thank you @happybeing What plugin can I use to store my Wordpress Media in my POD? I have created a folder in my PodBrowser account and want the Wordpress Media to automatically be stored there. Thank you!!

#9

You would need to write one.

Also, it may not be the best place to store & serve that data, you might find you have better performance writing it to S3 and serving it via a CDN — this is what is already largely the case.

Also, Wordpress (software) and Wordpress.com are two very different things.