Comment by gklitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gklitt | Hacker News Reader

1) I am a big fan of the general philosophy of Solid. But as others have mentioned, I've found it extremely difficult to understand specifics of the proposal or to see concrete progress, based on publicly available resources.

The best place I've found is Ruben Verborgh's blog (he's a researcher who's affiliated with Solid). For example here's a nice post which goes into more detail on the ideas behind Solid:

https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-f...

2) In terms of applications, I'd personally like to see more of a focus on productivity applications, rather than so much focus on social media. Better interop between cloud SaaS apps would be valuable to businesses and professionals, and would sidestep many thorny challenges like decentralized moderation.

As a concrete starting point: what if I could store my Google Docs text files on my own storage layer, and edit them in realtime using a variety of editor apps? This would resemble my ability to edit a .txt file on my computer in vim or TextEdit, but would port that metaphor to the world of modern online collaboration.

Here's a short Twitter thread I wrote on this topic:

https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1355255162626068482

3) I'm very curious to see more incremental paths from the current web to a decentralized approach. For example, what if we could start annotating existing websites with private data and sharing those annotations P2P, rather than starting over from scratch?

I've explored this a bit with my Wildcard project, where users can store annotations in a "spreadsheet" that is linked to a web page:

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/

I think that with a problem statement of "I want to control my data and how third parties use my data" Solid makes a good deal of sense. Personal information should be owned by you and you should be able to take it from service to service as you see fit. The two problems that I find with Solid, based on my own limited understanding are as follows:

(1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, your medical provider, whatever else you are using, does not have a clear incentive to provide their own data on you back to your Solid pod. It is far easier for them to keep it: it lets them do offline processing, and it keeps you more locked into their service. I'm not sure how one would solve this issue.

(2) Much like mobile apps with excessive permissions and the abuse of tracking elements - I don't see how Solid prevents the abuse of its service. If Solid catches on and Facebook has a permissions check saying "Let Facebook do 'SELECT * FROM .;' on your Solid data, how many people will click yes? Even if you request it each time, once the data is copied out, it is out there and can be packaged and resold, used to build advertising profiles, etc. You're back to the original problem of not being able to limit access to your data, but with extra steps. Where I think this could be solved is by Solid not providing the data directly, but by being a service which can answer queries. Queries could be items such as "Does user like cats? y/n/m". Or it could be something like "Here is an anonymized dataset being built out. Please add your input to it." Replies to queries could also have an amount of deliberately wrong or misleading answers given, depending on the service and endpoint to obfuscate your personal data on places that don't need it. While this can still be abused, it raises the bar for abuse.

The problem with Facebook is not that they are using user uploaded content, is that the user has no clue whatsoever the data is being collected by means of tracking actions (likes, time spend on a video...) and cross site tracking and what is going to be used for (Ads, make the site more addictive ?, recommendations?).

It's an issue of collecting user generated data without awareness, and with lack of transparency, that's very different from "I upload a picture and I share it with my closest friends only" for that issue, one could argue Facebook has a fair enough UI/UX.

I'm assuming that what would go into a pod is decided by the user and therefore is a separate issue.

I imagine the permission you are describing more like, "Let Facebook Access your Wedding photo's Pod" if well implemented, and "Let Garage Band access your Music pod".

another problem is that once data has been accessed, it can be stored and analyzed. maybe we need to play big tech's own game and apply ToS to any data we allow them to access?

When you put it that way it feels like Solid is a technical solution to a legislative issue.

Or perhaps a complement to a legislative issue. Solid could be an easy tool/set-of-practices that allows companies to abide by data privacy laws.

This exactly. This problem can never get better until normal individuals have the capacity and leverage to demand reasonable contractual limits on the use of their data, and the confidence that these limits will be enforced.

That's a tall order when we don't even have the language to describe what data-usage limits even mean.

You raise a good point - my example of asking if the user likes cats is something that could be an inferred metric based on their clicking on cat pictures and having lots of pictures of cats. It isn't the user data itself which Solid aims to control.

Trying to subdivide pods so that services map access from album A -> pod B and album B -> pod C sounds like a painful UX problem as well.. Do I place my ambient music in my music pod or my "office music" pod? Do I have a hierarchy of musical pods? I am joking a little, but it is a hard thing to have fit into an easy flow.

> The problem with Facebook is not that they are using user uploaded content, is that the user has no clue whatsoever the data is being collected by means of tracking actions (likes, time spend on a video...) and cross site tracking and what is going to be used for (Ads, make the site more addictive ?, recommendations?).

I'd say the two biggest questions that outweigh any others are:

Who will access the data?

What will they do with it?

The problem is that few of us know how our data is being used against us. "We will use the latest artificial intelligence methods to convince you that [political issue] is a good thing, since you're just on the other side of the fence."

The key thing you didn't mention is who the data will be sold to. I doubt the extremist nonsense, not related at all to any videos I've watched, creeps into my YouTube recommendations by accident. Who's paying them to generate clicks and viewing hours? What conversion are they attempting with my information? Only one side understands this game. Is there any justification for not having to reveal who paid them for my information or my clicks?

> If Solid catches on and Facebook has a permissions check saying "Let Facebook do 'SELECT * FROM .;' on your Solid data, how many people will click yes?

Excellent point. For the answer, just look at how many people give FB app permission to all their contact and photos.

Hint, if you add an observer on android, you will see that whatsapp and fb app, both scan your contact list every few minutes!

If you allow anything (access my contact list so i can find person X), they will take it literally everything they can (you entire contact list, every few minutes).

One possible answer to both of your questions is "with legislation", and I feel like to some extent a tightening of the rules here is what Solid anticipates. Perhaps not to the point that we could expect the big players of today to adopt a platform like Solid, but perhaps where the companies of tomorrow looking to avoid the headaches of compliance see offloading data storage to a dedicated entity managed by the user as an appealing option.

I think that may be the answer! If data is toxic waste then offloading the storage of toxic waste may be the new way to focus on your "core competency" of running your service.

With respect to (1), data is a liability (running afoul of GDPR, etc), so if someone else can manage the storage then that reduced my liability considerably. Facebook might decide that their incentive to track you around the web exceeds their incentive to avoid this liability (of the two are even mutually exclusive), but for many avoiding liability is a powerful incentive.

March 2020 I was investigating Solid for legaltech projects I'm designing. I thought it sounded like a great way for a user to create a master profile that can be used with multiple web apps and service providers, while maintaining more control over their data. I engaged with the Solid community and with Ruben, who was very nice and helpful. However, I found that the tech was still at the hobby stage, and I didn't really think the toys being built on it were very compelling. It was very disappointing considering it was already a couple years old and had a lot of hype around it. I hope that this moves forward, but it's almost a year later and seems to be the same story.

there's a "joke" on the dweb groups that "SOLID is freenet with less caching of other people's illegal content"

Look at Hyper Hyper Space!

https://github.com/hyperhyperspace

Its goals are similar, the approach is more pragmatic (p2p data layer using standard web browsers and webrtc).

We are launching both a Solid server TrinPod and a suite of productivity apps with TrinApp launchpad - free versions will be available end of the month https://graphmetrix.com

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