Prefix: I’m going to conflate two different things here: Solid and RDF/Linked Data, even though I know these are two different things - Solid is a spec implementing many open standards such as RDF/Linked Data. (I also know it’s also a suite of libraries, etc, but I’m simplifying here.)
I agree that there’s likely a gap in selling the idea: both of RDF and Solid. And perhaps I’m wrong on the latter, but in my view a lot of people who come to the Solid project already have the sense that things are “wrong” with the internet and need to be fixed. That’s okay - the problem is trying to sell that notion to the rest of the “developer-verse.”
In my view the target audience is the rest of the developers who are writing apps without really thinking about the social impact of what they create. Either you have to convince more of the developers in the world to think about these things up front, or you solve this at at technical level and make it easier such that when they write apps the toolkit they work with have these protections built in, or both. And finally, you have to just continually advertise these ideas and prove them out with demonstrative and impactful products. The goal of the last statement is to make “new” concepts (yes, I know the Semantic Web is not a new idea) a not so abstract idea; that developers get a warm fuzzy feeling of “ok, I see how this works and why I should do this, I can also do this.” Yes it’s marketing, when it all gets boiled down, but that’s to me just the nature of things.
I popped into SolidWorld last month intending to only watch, but when I heard that there’d be an open QA session/working group I decided to stick around. I asked if there was an active DevRev effort being made, and I don’t think the question was really understood. That probably was my fault, I had some technical issues at the time, and I’m not really good at explaining myself sometimes.
As I’m sure people who are on this forum are already aware: good ideas are not automatically implemented. And ideas are easy, production is hard.
I’m game for talking more about this, if others are interested.
Finally, I also want to state that this isn’t intended to be critical to what Inrupt and the Solid project are doing right now. I enjoyed the SolidWorld presentation this month and think those things are really great. I’m just of the view that there’s a really good potential to expand in that area: maybe a “Solid Developers” YouTube channel, a Twitter account, etc. And while I have personal problems with those companies, the point is sustainable and accessible channels for “educational advertisement” of the production and usefulness of Solid/open standards.
EDIT: I guess what I’m saying is there needs to be more product champions.
EDIT EDIT: Sorry, the coffee is kicking in. To me, the question becomes for any developer sitting down at their keyboard when starting a project: Why should I use Solid and develop my app to use Solid principles over what I already know? Using the MEAN stack, or SAFE stack, or any other stack really? In my view, if you can convince the general conversation of: I really should be writing my app in a “Solid” manner most of the time, then we’ve reached our goal. (And by Solid, I’m abstracting here to really mean: leveraging socially aware protocols, such as the Semantic Web, etc.)