Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

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:

@angelo Perfect timing for @dbat!

Just to make sure, I tried with the Community Solid Server as well, and it also works so I guess it really is something that will work with most Solid PODs :).

Though it seems to rely on the .html extension, so I'm not completely sure it's part of the spec. But it seems like it works in practice.

@dbat @csarven I understand the confusion, because Solid's vision is very broad and all encompasing. But if you actually understand how it works, it's not that complicated.

Still, I'm sure you will read many people talking about what it could do in the future. That's why I like to distinguish between what it can do today, and what it can potentially do in the future.

If you haven't seen it, I gave a talk where I explain the basics in ~10 minutes: https://noeldemartin.com/fosdem

@dbat @csarven Well, yes and no.

Technically, Solid PODs store 2 types of documents: RDF Resources and non-RDF resources (also called "binaries"). Ideally, most things you store would be RDF resources, because they are the ones that contain semantic data that any application can understand. But you can also have non-RDF resources like images, videos, ... or HTML files.

However, I don't think the spec mandates that when you visit the url for a non-RDF resource, it should return its contents.

@dbat Maybe @csarven can answer why the part on "how to write" is not explained :).

Personally I haven't used dokieli because I use Laravel for my actual blog. But if I wanted write plain HTML files I'd probably just use Github Pages because it seems a lot more straightforward than using a Solid POD. I think Solid can be great for interoperability, but for read-only documents (like a blog), it can be overkill. Maybe you could have a comments section with Solid though.

@dbat You can write html files and solidcommunity.net will render them if you visit the url. And you can use something like https://dokie.li to write the files. For example, like this: https://solidos.solidcommunity.net/

But I don't think that's something all POD providers will do, it may be specific to solidcommunity.net.

If you're interested to learn about the practical uses of Solid, I'd suggest looking at @angelo's video series on Practical Solid: https://forum.solidproject.org/t/practical-solid-video-series/7974

@dbat Unfortunately, that's one of the things I address in the article; there isn't any good POD provider I can recommend :(.

But things being what they are, the best recommendation I have is solidcommunity.net for an online account, and the Community Solid Server to play with Solid locally: https://github.com/CommunitySolidServer/CommunitySolidServer

The good news is that if an app is made properly, there shouldn't be any difference between an online account or localhost. I myself use a local POD when I'm just testing apps.

@ylebre @dbat Hey, thanks for recommending my apps :D.

I see how Solid can be confusing at first, I recently wrote a blog post answering exactly this question "Why would anyone use Solid?": https://noeldemartin.com/blog/why-solid

Though maybe it's easier to see it in practice... You can use one of my apps (for example, this recipe manager), and the point of Solid is that you or anyone else could also make an app using recipes that works with the same data. No need to choose only one: https://umai.noeldemartin.com/

@VincentTunru @jg10 @angelo They don't even mention Solid in this article, and I think that European eID has nothing to do with it either.

Which is fine, but for me the problem here is that, again, they are conflating this with Solid. It's fine if Inrupt, Europe, or whoever doesn't want to use Solid and they roll out their own spec/technology. But don't make people think that this has anything to do with Solid or what Tim is trying to do.