Solid Sustainability

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(EDIT: You can respond here in the forum itself: Questions below in the 3rd comment.)

At the suggestion of some community members, I have started a public document to understand what difficulties they are having in adopting/using/improving Solid. I would appreciate those interested to chime in:

https://hackmd.io/LHbMNWwdS4Sh6UX3CcA5QA

This is an informal collation of information that I am doing privately, not in any way associated with any of the bodies administering Solid. The aim is to not analyse or criticize these bodies but identify gaps so that the contributing community members can direct our limited energies to address the most critical/impactful issues first.

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The document works on a trust basis: Please do not delete stuff others have written, even if you disagree with them.

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@jeffz has suggested people may respond in the forum itself and we can move information into hackmd, if that is easier for anyone.

The questions are:

  • What are the barriers you see to contributing to Solid?
  • What do you think might be holding back Solid from greater adoption?
  • What changes you you would like to see in the community? How would you like to contribute to making Solid more sustainable and attractive?
  • Any other thoughts?
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On the second point, adoption of Solid, I think the biggest impediment is a lack of legal and legislative structures in giving people fundamental electronic privacy. Unless something is demanded by people, the landscape for privacy enhancing technologies like Solid Server, will be in the background, waiting for mass acceptance . I don’t think it is a partisan political issue. Almost everyone would desire control, except for those gaining from surveillance state hijacking of our data.

Technically it wouldn’t hurt to incorporate various proof systems,such as ZKPs, accumulators or JSON-LD BBS+, but maybe that could be done client side ?

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  1. I think one of the barriers is adoption. It is always tough to be pioneer, and although Solid is a great idea, it just not getting adopted and so it appears to not have any longevity.
  2. For better adoption, I think we need to hide it. My dad was in computer security, and always told me that security is important, but no one wants to see it. When integrating into an app, the whole sign up and login needs to be as seamless as it would be for any app that is signing up and login into their system only. If people want to know the tech behind the sign up and login, great. Show it to them, but don’t make it front and center.
  3. I’m learning Web Components and Solid, and hoping to make a library to help provide consistency for signup, login and POD management. Hopefully that will help promote it more.
  4. I noticed on one of your pages, although it may be an old page (Get a Pod · Solid) that you have a list of POD providers. Can the be a JSON file that we can pull in order to put it into our own apps when people are signing up?
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I’m getting a 403 Forbidden error when clicking the link.

I just did something similar actually and some of the discussion from Solid Interop in Practice might be relevant.

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I’m seeing a lack of compelling use cases out there for Solid. Something industry-specific that solves a fundamental problem would boost Solid in a huge way…

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Needs to be passwordless, in my opinion.

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@jeffz is compiling a list of places where Solid is being used. We are aware of rather compelling use cases except we are not doing a good job of advertising this. Expect this to be fixed soon…

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@rosano Thanks! I did read those opinions, though with a slightly different focus, they were interesting nonetheless.