Yes, really long-term. Imho dogfooding Solid for its own toolset is a nice-to-have at best and should be really low-priority. I created this thread (and others before that) to indicate way more urgent issues for the Solid initiative:
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People don’t get Solid, and it is still not clearly positioned.
- I posted about this (here, here and here) but also the Vision Panel has no solution still.
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Tools and communications are fragmented, making it easy to miss ongoing activity.
- Three landing pages for Solid (solid.mit.edu, solidproject.org, inrupt.com). If you ask me solidproject.org should be the main entrypoint to Solid. The MIT site should redirect to it, and Inrupt.com should be differently positioned (as it tackles the commercial side of things). Inrupt cannot be central (again wholly imho).
- Nineteen (!) github repositories for Panel discussions. Why aren’t these taking place on this discussion forum? (Note that Discourse has github integration plugin, so you can still have work documents there).
- Gitter has the core team interacting
- This forum has some community member discussion
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Solid is not actively reaching out, onboarding, building community, and hence has a high barrier to entry
- A bunch of articles promise revolutionary change (exciting!) but landing pages offer little info, spec is mostly empty, etc.
Since I started monitoring Solid over a year ago I have seen numerous people getting confused, disinterested or getting a ‘Solid, meh’ impression. And in this thread I got the impression that among invested community members there is a lot of frustration not being addressed.
It could well be that there is a well-founded strategy behind this. Might also be that commercial activities take precedence. Whatever it is, to me it seems worthwhile to discuss more openly, and tackle the issues (or provide pointers if that already happened).
Edit: I am delighted to find more solid information on solidproject.org so that’s moving in the right direction.