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Comment by ajacksified | Hacker News Reader

Good usecase for Solid (https://solidproject.org/).

It's also a good use case for a good old .vcard, which already has semantics for plenty of contact fields, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some for IRC.

Modern phones have done their utmost to end these. If you even find the option to load a vcard they will (often sneakily) copy the contents to Google Contacts or similar, and you don't know if the phone is even keeping the vcard updated. It has made the approach feel unreliable.

I've switched to self-hosting my contacts with Radicale[0] (with "backups" to a git repo) synced via DavX5[1], with no problem of them mixing with Google Contacts. It's pretty annoying though that basically no current contacts app recognizes common fields like the nickname for a person.

[0]: https://radicale.org/

[1]: https://www.davx5.com/

I fully expected some blockchain nonsense opening your link, I'm pleasantly surprised.

It seems like an interesting project but I wonder if it has any chance of reaching critical mass. The incumbents have no incentives to interoperate with such a protocol as far as I can tell.

The same is true for any open protocol, at least at first. Any open protocol has to reach widespread usage first, and only then will incumbents have to adopt it. That's an extremely difficult task, but hopefully not impossible.

Is there a single example in recent memory of an open protocol achieving mainstream success without being sponsored by a large company?

I really wish something like this Solid protocol would succeed, but I don't see how you could generate enough momentum for it at the moment.

I'm not aware of any, no, and there's 0 incentive for any large company to sponsor one.

Which large company sponsors Bitcoin?

ActivityPub?

Matrix (before they landed their gov contracts etc)?

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