I have not. A quick skim and you're right, it does seem adjacent. They have a wide ecosystem of apps too. All apps that I never heard of before. We should combine forces 🥹
Discussion
It's shockingly similar. This video is a good explainer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWVTjMsv7AE
I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing about it
nostr:npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424 - governments want to issue a web like SSN to centralize data for users😬 Plz don’t let NOSTR help create that route!
Why would any big tech companies implement this? Just the idea that it would level the playing field makes it unattractive to them.
And if you don't run your own pod, you're still giving someone access to, not just some, but all of your data. They're likely to have similar provacy policies to everyone else which allows them to share it with partners and monitize it.
I see some advantages to Solid, but if the economics of having customers pay for services and keeping their data private in return were on par with using and monetizing your data, Google, Facebook, and their friends would have switched to it years ago. Instead what we see are a handful of companies like Proton taking this approach,and they are only used by people who REALLY privacy.
I appreciate that Solid exists, but it doesn't seem like it will have a significant impact on silicon valley nor the average person.
It's a web operating system that is very powerful. It has standardized access control that allows users to share their stuff privately, in a group or publically. So for example, if nostr took that part, you could have a public square (twitter0, a group chat (telegram, facebook), or a private messenger (signal, matrix, whatsapp). There's lots of other things that can be done with a Turing complete operating system, such as payments, and smart contracts. Solid is a bit complex, and got more complex over time, so I dont think silicon valley would take it, although bluesky did look at it, they didnt really understand it. Solid is also the only project to have fully standardized decentralized identity on the web, which is under utiliized. It's a good system but not heavily used. I made a simpler version trying to take the best bits called solid lite, but it never really caught on.
In what sense is Solid an "operating system"?
Co-founder of solid here. I worked on Solid for 10 years before nostr, and founded and was first chair of the Solid community group. I worked for several years at MIT with Tim Berners-Lee to create the system.
But the realtime aspect was broken and no one would fix it. So I came to nostr, which was semi dead at the time. Even fiatjaf was not super active in the dev area. So we built up a small team that worked on making a usable system over the next couple of years, leading to the system we have today. Nostr replaces one component of solid. But we can also add all the other good parts, in order to complete the web project (though fiatjaf is somewhat against he web). Or we can add nostr to Solid. But Solid has lost a lot of users since the focus on nostr. I started work on solid-lite and nosdav to take the best bits of both projects together. It works, but I dont have as much time as I'd like to build them both out.
Wow, very cool. What do you see as the best parts of Solid that we should bring over to Nostr? Also, what does Tim Berners-Lee think of Nostr?
Best parts of solid to bring to nostr:
1. Decentralized identity
2. Personal Storage
3. Access Control (private, group, public)
4. Standardized and extensible data models
5. Decentralized Micro Apps
6. Relays operating as both http and wss servers
7. Making the web into a Turing-Complete operating system
All of the above leading to the completion of the web project
I've shown nostr to TimBL. But he's quite a mainstream guy, so he is very careful not to endorse something, in case he is misquoted. Is is largely focused on Solid. But I did manage to help get nostr identity and schnorr into solid via their chat app.
I'm all for having relays operate via http as well. Curious about the decentralized identity peice. Does solid use eliptic curve key pairs for identities? Do they have a spec for key rotation?
Solid uses EC curves for chat signatures, with schnorr, same as nostr. But there is no centralized document telling you what identity to use. Any identity system works with solid. So lots of different identity systems can work together. That is a double edged sword, because there is more to handle, but it offers a bit more freedom.
Relays operating via http, if done right, would be a tried and tested way to scale nostr. It is a controversial topic though. Some prefer the 'nostr only' approach.
I don't think it isn't "nostr only" to have relays operate via http as well. Something like GET `https://relay.damus.com/?kinds=0&author=
Something like this would indeed be very good. The harder thing would be making a clean API on which everyone could agree.
I built most of the early solid apps. Nostr is similar to the realtime pub/sub component I invented for Solid, which had bugs. We also managed to get taproot and schnorr signatures into the solid chat system. Both could be brought together, but it's a lot of work, and there is no appetite for it.