Does Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the Solid project hold up today?

Question

If you search for information about data sovereignty, privacy, data portability, digital identity standards, etc then you end up with Sir Tim's initiative called Solid [1] and it's commercial arm Inrupt.Solid received some criticism [2] around practical implementation and the difficulties of achieving widespread adoption.Has Sir Tim's vision for Web 3.0 turned out to be a dead duck or is it a viable and practical technology that app developers are adopting?If not Solid, then what are the best practices and technologies for building with data sovereignty and portability?[1] https://solidproject.org/about [2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/inrupt_tim_bern.html

krapp · Accepted Answer

I mean... we're seeing a bit of a trend in defederated and alternative platforms to Twitter right now, with Mastodon and Nostr and the like, but as far as I'm aware no one has built a Solid-based platform. At least I don't recall seeing it mentioned on HN, and the last story about Solid is two years old, and got no comments.
There are more current comments about Solid but most seem to be along the lines of "I like the concept but no one seems to be building anything with it."
That's where I sit with it. As a Mastodon and Pixelfed enjoyer, one of the huge flaws I find with the ActivityPub protocol is the way identity is tied to specific instances. Just having a flat metadata file, maybe with a pgp signature, acting as a global identity for all applications using a protocol and having direct control over my data would be great.
So yeah I guess it's dead. Shame.

dgellow · Answer

Dead duck