We got more insight into the project in last Thursday’s Solid World. If you missed it, you can watch the full recording here: Solid World November 2022.
There is a demo of the onboarding and usage of the app that is about 2 minutes long at 06:37, in case you want to learn more about how it works.
Seeing the video, it solved one of my doubts which was how to add friends. As I could gather, when someone creates a watch party, they get a link they can share with their friends using 3rd party channels. They can then use this link to join the party, and you can add people from the watch party to your friend’s list. As far as I could tell, the friends’ profiles do not expose the webId nor any Solid-specifics either. So this reinforces my opinion that Solid is just an implementation detail and this app could be implemented without using Solid at all.
Other than that, there are a couple more things I’d like to mention.
The first one is they shared some of the results of their research, and there is one in particular I’d like to comment. At 21:05 they say one of the UX challenges was that “people’s attitudes to controlling data don’t match their behaviour”. Although I understand the point, I think there are a couple of problems with reaching this conclusion.
One problem is that even if most people wouldn’t enact control over their data, and they really trust BBC to keep it, there will always be a small percentage of people who don’t. And the point of Solid is precisely letting this small percentage of people do it without hurting the majority (I still think the UX can be as good whilst respecting data ownership). This is the same idea as making websites accessible. There is probably a very small percentage of people who have accessibility requirements, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make websites accessible.
Another problem is that this part of the user journey is probably the worst one to gauge whether people want to do something with their data or not. It’s all sunshine and roses when you start using a service, but it’s really when you want to switch to another service or make it interoperable with another that you would enact your data control.
Other than UX challenges, I also wanted to comment on the reason why they are not allowing 3rd party PODs to use their app. They replied to this specific question at 46:15 (and allude to some comments they made at 19:22).
One of the things they mentioned is that RDF data is already exposed in the HTML markup, and they encouraged people to check that out, so that’s great.
They also mentioned that the main reasons why they aren’t opening up the POD are the existing policies at the BBC and some UX challenges. I don’t think the policies are going to change any time soon, so I understand not opening their POD to 3rd party apps. But hopefully their policies don’t prohibit using 3rd party PODs in their app, so the main blocker should be UX challenges.