Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

It's also funny how my situation right now is very similar to my situation back then. I've changed in many ways (yes, I also cringe reading some of that blog post 😅), but the core is the same :).

I hope the next 10 years are just as fun!

10 years ago today, I launched my personal website :D. It's been one of the best decisions of my life. Jobs and platforms come and go, but my website has been a constant outlet that will remain. I wish everyone I met had a personal website!

https://noeldemartin.com/blog/starting-something-new

I mean, just look at the ending remarks:

"Umai shows us that Solid is a vision worth striving for. A vision where we can all have our cake and eat it too. And have the recipe for it. Securely stored in our POD."

🤣

Still, it wasn't all smooth sailing. I had to tweak it multiple times to get a decent result. But I'm happy with how it turned out. So I may look into this further, let me know what you think!

These journals are a bit all over the place, but there's a lot of interesting information in there. I always thought that AI would be useful to make them easier to consume, and this podcast format is perfect.

If you're curious about how I created Umai, and you haven't read my development journals, I just generated a podcast with NotebookLM. Plug this in your favorite podcast app to give it a listen (or click to listen in the browser): https://noeldemartin.com/podcast/feed.xml

@tychi Thanks for your comments. Yes, I agree with mostly everything you're saying. But there is nothing inherent in Solid that prevents this from happening as well (making an app that is user friendly, etc.). I'm sure if people like Dan decided to spend some time making Solid Apps, they would turn out as good, if not better, than Bluesky.

So the question remains. What made them choose Bluesky rather than Solid or any other decentralization project...

@tychi Rather than talking about it as Solid's competition on a technical level, it seems like Bluesky is the only decentralization project that is attracting the mainstream's attention, and is getting A players on board. Other projects seem very fringe.

But if you watch Dan's presentation without knowing much about the technical details, it rings very similar to what Solid is trying to achieve.

Hence my comment about it being just the money, or if there is something else there...

@tychi I know that Solid is lacking in many aspects, I can understand why someone would find Bluesky more appealing.

The point I'm trying to make is that at some point, Bluesky was as experimental (or more) than Solid. But they managed to get a lot of interesting people on board to improve it. Whilst Solid seems to be stuck in time :(. I still think Solid has the potential to improve a lot, but it's been like that for years, "potential".

In any case, this was more of a rhetorical question xD.

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: