I think there are many different use cases. I’ve already discussed them in the other forum post (Back then I wanted to do it in the browser with web extensions, but I sadly didn’t find a way to do that).
In the same way the file systems gives multiple installed apps access to local data, a local pod could give online apps a controlled access to local pod data.
Main benefits (I see)
- One can use linked data on the own file system and access it with (online/offline) apps
- Common (solid like) interface for apps to access local file storage. The file storage can be seen just as any other solid pod and hence uploading/downloading files from/to an app would be easy.
- Less bandwidth usage, because the files can be stored and used locally (-> less energey, faster, offline usage)
- No need to trust and afford a pod provider for local projects (-> better data security and privacy)
- Could be used to serve any cloud storage service (e.g. Dropbox) as a local solid pod
Possible benefits for developing:
- Running tests locally (both automated tests (e.g. for solid-file-client) and manual tests (e.g. for solid-filemanager) (-> faster and
- Can be tested against multiple fetch libraries which possibly all follow the spec, but maybe implement them slightly different. For instance if there was a NSS like fetch library and a Pod-Server like fetch library, one could run tests against both.
(For automated testing, it would probably be better to make use of solid-rest which doesn’t need to run over localhost)
I guess that there are more use cases, but these are the ones I have in mind for now.