Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

I just created an RSS feed of my /now page! I haven't been very active in my blog, but I've kept updating this, so subscribe if you want see what I'm up to! https://noeldemartin.com/now/rss.xml

Having said that, Dan's talk has made me reconsider my opinion on Bluesky. I trust him, and I don't believe he'd be lying to our faces. So I may dig into the details to learn more.

Not only that, apparently Bluesky is not even living up to their own ideals (TLDR: Bluesky is not really decentralized... "yet"): https://beige.party/@possibledog/113367997579738126

And in case you're wondering, yes, the Bluesky team did know about Solid. Before announcing the AT protocol, they did an "ecosystem review" in which they studied all the existing solutions they would proceed to ignore: https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/README.md

Solid has been around for a while, long before Bluesky, but it hasn't managed to pick up any traction. I wonder how Bluesky managed to attract talented developers like Dan and others. It can't just be "the money"... right?

But there are also some things I like from Bluesky. I really like what they did with encryption, and the way users control their identities seems a lot more straightforward.

Besides the universal data formats, I also prefer Solid because of its focus on private data. The AT protocol seems more focused on public data and social interactions. If anything, I see it as an alternative to ActivityPub, not Solid.

This is what I wrote:

25:20 If you're interested in a "galaxy brain" solution, check out the Solid Protocol. It is very similar to what Dan explains in this presentation, but it has universal formats, and it was created by the person who created the actual web (Tim Berners-Lee).

(by the way, if you haven't seen the talk, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1sJW6nTP6E)

First of all, it's ironic that my comment on YouTube seems to have been swallowed up by the algorithm 😅. If you open the video, you won't find it unless you sort by "newest comments". I wonder why it doesn't show up in the default "top comments" view, not even at the bottom :/.

A few days ago I watched Dan Abramov's new talk, "Web Without Walls". It's a great talk, as always! But there are a couple of things I'm uneasy about.

Let me explain:

It's still a proof of concept, but let me know if you think this is cool or you have some questions :D.

I'm calling it "Vivant", and you can find this and other examples in this playground: https://noeldemartin.github.io/vivant/

Recently, I've been learning to make animations on the web. And I'm starting to understand why Framer Motion is one of the reasons for people to choose React over #Vue.

But I still want to use Vue! So I started working on a library that supports layout animations, like this one:

Inrupt recently open-sourced a Data Wallet, and I have some comments about it. If you care about #Solid, I think it's important that you're aware of what's going on. Join the discussion in the forum: https://forum.solidproject.org/t/inrupts-data-wallet/7836

Somewhat reluctantly, I'm going to start using Bluesky 😅. Twitter is getting worse by the day (almost nobody sees my Tweets anymore), and I've had this Mastodon account for ages, but it's too technical for some people. So I'll be using 3 apps that do basically the same thing 🤷.

In any case, as you may already know, I'm not super active. I'll continue cross-posting everywhere, but the best place to follow my work is still my website, which you can subscribe through RSS: https://noeldemartin.com/now

This was a far fetched idea, but seeing how easy it's been, I may consider making it for real. I know the devil is in the details, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised. I also have to give credit to Laravel, which makes this type of quick prototyping a breeze.

Last week I started tinkering with this Solid Server from scratch, and now it works with most of my apps (including authentication!). Furthermore, it uses a Nextcloud account for storage :D.

It's just a proof of concept; and I didn't implement any of the hairy stuff (authentication, authorization, content negotiation, etc). But with very little effort, it works with a couple of my apps. So it already covers 90% of the functionality I rely on as an app developer.

It's because of things like this that I always say that in reality, Solid is very easy to learn. If you grasp the basics, it's really not a lot more complicated than understanding REST apis.

During my sabbatical, I've decided to try making a Solid Server from scratch to see how complicated it would be... And turns out I got it working in a single day 🤯.

It's very experimental, but check it out if you're curious: https://github.com/NoelDeMartin/lss

#Solid #SolidProject