Solid

The Solid project "aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy"[2] by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users' control rather than controlled by other entities.
The ultimate goal of Solid is to allow users to have full control of their own data, including access control and storage location.
From Solid (web decentralization project)- wikipedia

Hi all who have a read of some or all of this, thanks for taking the time. I mean this post to be a conversation starter about possible avenues/roadmaps for an Aussie Zone/users option to implement SolidOS.

As i've read about this Tim Berners-Lee led project over the last few months i've become more convinced that the values of the Aussie Zone community match very well with the data sovereignty allowed by Solid. I first found out about Solid on The Man Who Invented the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee) - Rest is Politics Leading.

I also believe this could provide a long-term durable answer for regulatory challenges like the social media ban. As of December 10th you need to be sixteen to hold an Aussie.Zone account.

I decided to put it in c/rtfa instead of c/meta because i suppose its not necessarily specifically about AZ at the moment. And theres a lot of links with lots of reading, i think it would all add up to more than 2000 words, so it seems suitable for this community.

Following are some links to explainers or implementations of the technology i've found:

Solid (web decentralization project)- wikipedia

I found a good explanation of the dssign on here,

In more detail, Solid consists of the following components:[16]

An organized collection of standards and data formats/vocabularies providing the same capabilities that centralized social media services offer, such as identity, authentication, login, permission lists, contact management, messaging, feed subscriptions, comments, discussions, and others.
Specifications and design notes describing a REST API to extend existing standards, to guide developers building servers or applications.
Servers that implement the Solid specification.
A test suite for testing and validating Solid implementations.
An ecosystem of social applications, identity providers, and helper libraries that run on the Solid platform.
A community providing documentation, discussion, tutorials, and presentations

This next quote describes what I see as my place and reason for making this post,

...Berners-Lee advises that people without coding skills should instead advocate publicly for changing the Internet...

Intro to SolidOS - w3.org

The above link is a great illlustrated explanation of Solid by w3.org.

Solid project

Imagine having your own online storage, which you control. You store information once and decide who can access what, when you need services like mortgage applications or medical care.

This is what Solid can do. It’s a bit like carrying all your data in a rucksack (backpack) with lots of pockets. To access the data, different apps can only open the pocket you allow them to open, rather than taking the whole rucksack. The rest stays private.

Solid lets people take control of their data and combine it to achieve new results. It gives creators new collaborative tools while passing power back to users. It’s technology that returns the web to its original vision of serving people.

Standards for Agentic Commerce: Visa's Bold Move and What It Means

Inrupt is Tim Berners-Lee's commercial enterprise for Solid. They're really onto the agenticAI stuff now, so i'm jot sure if its a useful link beyond building a larger picture of the technology's use.

Activitypods

The above link is a project that is along the same lines as what I imagine AZ would be implementing if the community were to go down this road. It looks like users could even use Activitypods itself, maybe with some sort of bridging/onboarding of the existing accounts.

Here are some quotes from the page,

ActivityPub
ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 ontology. It provides a client-to-server and a server-to-server API for all common social features: following, liking, reposting... It became a W3C recommandation in 2018 and is used nowadays by dozens of softwares.

What is the main shortcoming of ActivityPub ?

ActivityPub wants to make it possible to create decentralized apps. But to post videos, you need an account on a PeerTube instance. And to post images, you need an account on a PixelFed instance. You must thus handle multiple accounts, with their profile, list of followers, etc.

How does ActivityPods solve this shortcoming ?

With ActivityPods, you have only one profile, one outbox, one inbox and one list of followers - all in a single place. Applications connect to your Pod to post activities, read the inbox and fetch data. And of course they can connect to any existing fediverse application !

...

ActivityPods
The framework to create decentralized social apps
ActivityPods brings together two game-changing technologies, ActivityPub and Solid Pods, and empowers developers to create truly decentralized applications

ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 ontology. It provides a client-to-server and a server-to-server API for all common social features: following, liking, reposting... It became a W3C recommandation in 2018 and is used nowadays by dozens of softwares.

What is the main shortcoming of ActivityPub ?

ActivityPub wants to make it possible to create decentralized apps. But to post videos, you need an account on a PeerTube instance. And to post images, you need an account on a PixelFed instance. You must thus handle multiple accounts, with their profile, list of followers, etc.

How does ActivityPods solve this shortcoming ?

With ActivityPods, you have only one profile, one outbox, one inbox and one list of followers - all in a single place. Applications connect to your Pod to post activities, read the inbox and fetch data. And of course they can connect to any existing fediverse application

Thanks for reading, if you've made it this far sorry for the terrible way i've put this together, had a certain little people climbing all over me this morning!

I'm not really advocating any specific action, as i say, I mean to start a discussion and get this topic into the collective knowledge of the community on AZ, as well as Lemmy in general.

The way I see it, theres two pillars of issues with the internet today, one is driven by siloed and monopolised platforms which ActivityPub deals with quite well. While the other is the issue of data sovereignty, or control and agency over your online data, which Solid presents an answer for.

I'd love feedback, and comments, but i know theres a lot to wade through here, so i take it as a win if people are little more familiar today with this as an option than yesterday.

Cheers, Gorgritch_umie_killa.