MySolido — a local-first personal data vault (no provider needed)

Hi all,

I built MySolido, a personal data vault that runs entirely on your own PC. No cloud provider, no third-party server — just a local Solid Pod under your control.

Why I built it

There are wallets (EUDI), identity systems (Jouw.id, Athumi) and infrastructure being built across Europe. But there’s no consumer product where people can actually store their stuff. MySolido fills that gap — it’s the car, not the highway.

What it does

  • 20 document categories (identity, medical, financial, legal, etc.)

  • Drag & drop upload

  • Sharing via WAC with 4 permission levels (read, write, append, public)

  • Expiry dates on shared items

  • Recursive search across all folders

  • Inline PDF and image preview

  • Trash with 30-day recovery

  • Audit log

  • Dark mode

  • ZIP backup export

  • Responsive (desktop + mobile)

Tech stack

  • Community Solid Server v7.1.8

  • Flask/Python for the UI

  • Runs on localhost — no external calls

  • MIT license

Links

Questions for the community

  1. Local ↔ cloud interop: My pod runs on localhost:3000. What are the established patterns for making a local pod discoverable to remote pods? Lightweight proxy, WebID resolution?

  2. ODRL on personal data: I’m looking at ODRL policies for phase 2 — legally enforceable usage rules like “my doctor can view my blood results until March 1, read-only”. Is anyone working on ODRL integration with Solid pods?

  3. Solid Notifications: For cross-pod sharing notifications — what’s the practical readiness of the Solid Notifications Protocol?

Feedback and criticism welcome. Happy to demo if anyone is interested.

Wim


1 Like

This is pretty cool, it’s very similar to something I’m working on as well :).

To answer your questions, I can only help you with the first one, local/cloud interop. I still haven’t decided how I’ll do that, but I think it can be done with any standard bridging software. I have used ngrok in the past to connect to a POD running locally from a different network, as long as you configure the base url properly it should work. I’ve also seen things like Tailscale that some people use to expose local services on the internet. Though I’m not sure how easy that is to configure with CSS.

Although I will say, ideally Solid Apps should be able to work against localhost! The point of Solid is that apps connect directly from the browser to your solid server, so it shouldn’t be necessary for a 3rd party server to access a POD outside of your computer… But I’m sure you’ll find apps that don’t work like that. You can try with one of my apps, Umai, to see if it works for you.

I have tried running your project locally, and it seems to work fine but I’m not sure which credentials to introduce in the login screen :sweat_smile:. Maybe this is obvious somewhere in the interface, but I don’t understand the language. Also, if I weren’t already familiar with Solid I would know how to log in to an app. I did use the POD’s url, `127.0.0.1:3000`, but I think most people’s intuition is to use the same url they use to browse the POD. In this case, `localhost:5000`, but that didn’t seem to work.