Is anyone familiar with Solid from Tim Berners-Lee?
Seems adjacent to Nostr
Discussion
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 🥹
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.
Intermeresting
I played around & created a pod with some folders and a movie list a few years ago. It was so early I couldn't find anybody to share my movies with 😂 At the time, it looked like it was prioritizing self hosting & granting of access of/to personal information. I remember reading about contracting with some clinics. I tried to access my pod a few months ago but I couldn't remember how 😂
three main problems are:
1. few users
2. many bugs
3. complex - nobody really understands it all
hopefully it will become a w3c web standard in 2 years, and will get more attention and funding
I really liked the direction. You're right, though, when you say complex. I had no clue... it did provide me an epiphany moment about how the web could work. I came into nostr with a slightly better understanding because of it. I still get email updates on occasion. They have put together some really good educational videos.
They have a $100 million company behind it. They have a good marketing team. But few users.
To understand everything in solid is really 10,000 pages of reading. And misunderstanding the smallest thing can lead to implementation problems.
It's a very good idea though, that the web is not finished, and that we can finish off the project. The current spec has become a bit too complex.
A well picked combination of nostr and solid would indeed complete the web project, IMHO.
The web project started with personal servers, then drifted from them to its peril. The web project will be complete when personal servers are as ubiquitous as carbon molecules.
Why serve?
Sign Things And Relay Them
"relay them" to what, exactly?
An always-on, internet-connected software endpoint.
I'm calling that "a server" and saying every individual should have the affordance to run always on, Internet connnected software for themselves and others, with zero knowledge or maintaince.
Having run personal ones for decades, servers are a means to an end: it's the data that matters. Write things, sign them, and spread them around. People will find them, and as long as they know where they came from, trust them. Servers are rarely secure and should almost never be trusted on their own. And once you stop implicitly trusting servers it's easy to see that most of the time it doesn't matter who owns the server, as long as there are many that are independently run. This is what makes nostr powerful.
When you "spread the data around" when does it land? An always-on, connected device.
Where does a Nostr relay run? An always-on, connected device.
I honestly don't see where we disagree.
Wow, yet another one of your posts in my feed. I'm not letting you bait me into blocking you so that you can reply to my shit uncontested. Stop clogging my fucking feed. Get out of my Primal followers list.
The ideal web isn't having more servers per person. Code will have bugs, hardware will fail, networks will be down. Instead we need better data. When you say something on nostr it doesn't necessarily land on any one server. As long as it lands somewhere, it can propagate to many places and what you said can be reconstructed. Data, not code.
With homoiconicty, there is no distinction between data and code 🤯
Wow, yet another one of your posts in my feed. I'm not letting you bait me into blocking you so that you can potentially reply to my posts without me getting the chance to refute your bullshit. Stop clogging my fucking feed. Get out of my Primal followers list.
Great concept.
IMHO, it's dead on arrival: malicious actors can just scope creep their clueless users like how some Android apps asks piles of permissions to provide a weather app, zero incentive for large services to use it, I don't see non-technical users paying for pods to avoid it disappearing overnight (they don't care that much for privacy), and I don't see how service providers will just give pods for free forever and reliably.
Yes. Been around for ages.
Seems to have an issue with adoption
Yes, I helped create it before I moved to nostr. AMA 😉