Well, I ended up going down a deep rabbit-hole tonight. Here's me rubber-ducking stuff I've found out about #Solid, along with some challenges I've seen so far regarding combining with #ActivityPub.

https://codeberg.org/postmodern/hubris/issues/1

It might not be worth adopting Solid at all. Some aspects of it are really neat, and it might be possible to do some level of integration at the user level (eg, "every ActivityPub actor is also a Solid Pod User"), but the heart of it revolves around a Document database and files, instead of a relational database and columns/rows/etc.

You'd basically have to radically redesign how a fediverse app even works, to the point where every user basically just has all their data in something similar to a personal WebDAV share.

@deadsuperhero I do like the idea of storing website settings in my own pod. Both as the data owner and the application developer.

Storing user data safely is complicated and increasing litigious. Having a pod for an app like @elk to store my user settings in would relieve them of a need to a lot of operational infrastructure.

@andy @elk I agree, but also the main problem involves how the data even gets put together.

A document database like Solid admittedly doesn't really map to existing ActivityPub implementations in a way that makes sense - Solid is almost like cloud storage for files, but social platforms heavily rely on databases to store data, and make sense of it.

If Solid were capable of also managing a relational database of just the data the user made, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

@deadsuperhero @andy @elk

Hmm, I recently saw #solid discussion about document storage versus graph model. Now on to remembering where 🤔

> adherents seem to act like Linked Data is the best thing since sliced bread

Yeah.. found this paper going into excruciating detail on nagging feelings I have for so long. Posted on #SocialHub:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/linked-data-versus-activitypub/2975

@deadsuperhero @andy @elk

Can't find.. might've seen it in the matrix chatroom, idk.

Anyway, I found this recent topic on the Solid community forum:

https://forum.solidproject.org/t/is-a-solid-pod-a-set-of-documents-or-is-it-a-knowledge-graph/6028

@smallcircles @andy Thanks for the links! Super interesting discussions, definitely makes me wonder about alternative approaches.

Conversely, after thinking about it...maybe the document method is not so limiting? If you have an app that has some kind of listener to check changes inside of a container, it might be possible to translate things done within a Solid Pod (Create, Update, Delete) to activities dispatched from an ActivityPub Outbox.

The biggest thing is that you'd still have to reconcile WebID identities to also be ActivityPub actors, and provide inbox / outbox methods.

@deadsuperhero @andy

Yes. I saw you already found the #ActivityPods project. I'd have a chat with the developer (they are on both SocialHub and Solid forum).

Might also ping @noeldemartin who is doing very nice stuff wrt practical Solid applications.