I could be wrong, because I'm also a little bemused by the lack of specifics on the site, but it sounds like the Pod stores sort of "quanta of shareable information" (photos, essays, one's phone number, etc.), and makes them accessible via authenticated APIs.
So instead of posting a photo on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one would (ideally) authorize Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to read photos stored on the Pod with a "shared publicly" tag (or similar), and then anything with that tag would show up automatically in one's feed on all three sites, and (if also authorized) push reactions and comments back to the Pod.
If I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like a neat idea. I'll be interested to see how well it does.
Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out.
I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of the actual engineering mechanisms, something is wrong.
It is hard for me to believe some consortium of really knowledgeable web architects and inventors made this. It feels like a PR website with attractive purple colors to make me feel cozy. But I want to know really how it works!
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible.
I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either.
The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver.
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?).
RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people.
Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.
> The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists
The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet:
1. You cannot make people tell the truth.
2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth.
3. You cannot always make people do things the right way.
4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way.
So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users.
The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person.
Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time.
The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user.
Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now.
OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.
> The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me.
Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use.
Tim Berners-Lee is as finished as Woz. We should stop giving him air time because he's just embarrasing himself. Reminds me of this recent story with Michael Atiyah.
Ain't we all fed up with the current status of the web? At least there's someone sticking to his vision, and maybe (maybe) his work could inspire others to come up with a real solution.
Were it not so esoteric, I'd be all in favour of something like Urbit that builds a whole new layer on top of the existing foundation with a real push for _personal computing_, not just application services.
Since a real computer costs jack all anymore and gigabit will be increasingly common routers should have an app store. P2P via other peoples routers could handle load beyond what the individual router could handle.
Terrible seem apt. As proposals go, this seems to border on the insanely naive.
It’s impossible to find in the impenetrable marketing speak, but presumably the backend here is some off the shelf LDP? Existing LDPs tend towards being profoundly unscalable; typically the number of clients they can handle without choking per second is in the low single digits. All of the implementations I’ve seen are more concerned with adherence to an ill-conceived shitpile of “standardize-first, use-case later” W3C standards than ever tackling the core performance and protocol problems.
And I cannot imagine a worse choice for presenting Linked Data to the modern web than RDF. It’s ugly, dog-slow to parse, and is INCAPABLE of representing a simple ordered list without significantly painful work-arounds that practically by their nature force N+1 queries on to clients. JSON-LD solves a lot of this and has existed for years.
And then we’ve got yet another attempt to pretend the W3C’s WebACL spec is anything other than a lunatic’s fever-dream of a UI and UX nightmare. We’ll apparently just expose it to end users to let them manage their data. That’ll end well.
The Semantic Web Community’s biggest problem is that they think continually recreating “existing thing but with as many of these awful W3C standards as they can shoehorn in” is some kind of Good in and of itself, no matter how bad the resulting user experience would be.
Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.
I do not. Geocities was a miserable collection of weird text that was almost completely unusable. FTP and IRC were great for the people who used them, but the community was small and still exists.
For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
Browsing it makes clear why Gopher would not still be a thing, except in the same sense that there are hobbyists who maintain Model Ts and steam engines and whatnot. For a time, Gopher was a miracle and a wonder. That time lasted about a year. The web does all it does and infinitely more.
Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose.
But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The <script> and <applet> tags and now defunct concepts like VRML demonstrate that the "only static, only hypertext" version of the web you miss were more due to the primitive nature of an undeveloped platform than a state of grace and purity which has since been defiled by the ability to do computation on the web... the intent for the web to host both static and interactive content was there practically from the beginning.
>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
I don't. I like being able to watch videos and play games on the web, and buy things, and so on.
And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had. I know that's an unpopular sentiment to voice on HN, but as far as most end users are concerned, Reddit and Twitter and even Facebook are useful in ways that IRC and web chatrooms never were.
> And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had
Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.
I feel like that's not all that rare—you just do it as a series of blog posts these days. You could make a strong case that a set of independent pages that freely interlink is a better format, but still, the impulse is there, so people have found a way to make that kind of content.
I don't see many independent bloggers these days. Especially outside of the tech community. Most of it feels like it's becoming hidden behind monetized walled gardens.
I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites. Even today the slower and more thoughtful pace of a traditional forum is more conductive to decent discussions than the obsessively upvote/view focused world of social media sites.
>I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites.
Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.
I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...
Nostalgic yeah, but that doesn't mean very much... After all, those discovering the web today will feel nostalgia for the current version in N years.
As exciting as those days were, I wouldn't want to go back to dial-up, CRT monitors, no-broadband, no-wi-fi, no-wikipedia, no-dropbox, no-stackoverflow, no-git, no-digital-distribution, etc.
No spam. No tracking. No monetization. No clickbait.* No Zuckerberg. No profiling. No selling surfing habits. No social credit score. No tying insurance rates to activity monitors. No bosses firing people for expressing their personal opinions on private time. No HR minions making hiring decisions based on personal web spaces.
And yes there was broadband in the old days. It just wasn't widely distributed. It was mostly at businesses and universities. As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier.
On the plus side, future generations will never know the horrors of a RealPlayer "Buffering..." message.
"As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier."
100% this. About 8 years ago, I had LIGHTNING fast loading times on every page I visited. 800-1000ms was average, on a connection that is slower than mine is today... Now 4-8 seconds is average, and the new Gmail takes 10-12 seconds to load.
I'm nostalgic for the days when the web was faster and more functional than it is today.
Even in the very early days of the web, technologists were talking about the browser as a potential platform for applications. This was pretty much always the vision for browsers, it just took a while to figure out exactly how to do it.
But that was where Netscape, a commercial company, and others wanted to take the web. The original idea of the web was to share simple marked up documents, not applications. The image tag was even hotly debated when it was first introduced.
As for figuring out how to turn the web into an app platform, Netscape and Sun might have gotten farther in the 90s if it wasn't for Microsoft. There used to be a saying in the 2000s that MS held back technology for a decade.
I miss aspects of it, for sure. What I think you're getting at here is that we used to have a cleaner separation of protocol, data format, and client application - enabling us to have multiple ways of combining the above. Tons of email clients, tons of formats, but ultimately just one email namespace - the DNS. That's much more idiomatically Internet than webapps are, which rely on my browser very carefully executing instructions provided by a site with very little control on my part as to what they do with the chunk of screen real-estate they've been afforded.
There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.
> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
I don't understand the premise. Tumblr is / was over ten times larger than Geocities. It did what you're describing. It was still wildly popular with young people just as recently as a few years ago.
Tumblr wasn't personal in the way that Geocities was.
With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.
Tumblr is the epitome of a walled garden. The flowers look pretty, but you still have to plant them in neat, orderly rows. Even Facebook's Pieces of Flair offered more of a creative outlet.
You can still make oversized blinking purple Comic Sans text on a black background above an animated "Under Construction" GIF. But you have to do it in CSS.
> With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.
I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.
Douglas Adams expressed this well:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.
Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.
Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.
The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed and responsiveness often take a backseat, but improvements do happen. (AMP, CDNs like CloudFlare, use of native apps, etc.)
Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.
Yes, exactly. So while today on a slow connection you can find yourself waiting a long time for Gmail to load up and let you read your email, in the days of 300 baud your email would be downloaded in batch and your mail reader would come up instantly, letting you peruse and read your email at leisure.
I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?
I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.
The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.
Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.
One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.
Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.
Ok, maybe I was spoiled with 100 Mbps connection at the time but I was mainly talking about Apps. They were not web-based, all written in C, some form of BASIC or Assembler.
Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.
It's not just age, it's a sense of loss. I can still go down to the store and buy milk in bag form, just as I could when I was a kid, so I don't feel nostalgic about it even though it's old. I feel nostalgic about the web of my youth because that place is gone now and it'll likely never come back.
In tech circles we like to obsess over new technologies and all of the amazing new possibilities they've brought. We don't spend nearly as much time talking about all we've lost.
While I agree with the sentiment (it's become more cumbersome to create and access content on the web), it goes without saying that the vast majority of users find value in web apps and the platform-agnostic functionality they provide.
It’s not so much the web apps, but the professionalization of content that makes me nostalgic. The charming thing about the early web is that almost all of it looked equally terrible- even the sites made by paid experts looked only marginally better than what junior high schoolers would crank out in computer class (ask me how I know.)
This created space for passionate amateurs to create content for their niche. You got wonderfully personalized, quirky sites that didn’t look weird or suspicious and, importantly, actually got traffic (or what passed for a decent amount of traffic at the time.)
The rise of Google, security issues, “walled gardens”, blogging platforms, and YouTube have basically ended the ability of a new amateur site to get a significant amount of new traffic. Internet stardom has moved to YouTube, Twitter or more specialized communities like Reddit, StackExhange, or Wikipedia. The Wikia networks have driven out most need for fan sites. Social networks are a better sharing mechanism than personal blogs meant for keeping friends and family up to date.
This all has had the effect that the internet “feels” far more structured and professionalized than its early days, and IMO is much more a “winner take all” environment for content. I miss the amateur web the same reason I go to high school sports and watch low ranked college football teams- the play may not be as good, but passion is the same, the games feel more human and occasionally you see unexpected flashes of brilliance, beauty, and serendipity that you’ll never see in the professional world.
As follow up- there still is space within some of the walled gardens, primarily YouTube and Twitter, and I’m sure some emerging media will support amateurs early as well. I certainly don’t want to go purely back to webrings, marginal search engines, hand crafted directories, and printed “internet phone books” (yes, this was a thing) as it made it far more difficult to accomplish tasks, but TBL and others fighting against the Balkanization and centralization of the web content as a whole is not a bad thing.
90% of the web apps that are useful to me would be equally useful as native local apps with local data. As a native MacOS or iOS program they would be hugely faster, without latency, and just as useful out of signal area (still common enough that it happens daily for me).
That would leave me to choose which I wanted to sync either internally or via something like dropbox.
Most of the innovations in the browser that enable apps also promote and enable tracking, auto start videos, and JS loaded ads, and use of the browser as surrogate OS. Mostly I find this a serious misstep. I don't miss bad design and sites that were cut up bits of image etc.
> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
Definitely! There's a lot of that sentiment over at Micro.blog [1], which has built a community of writers & indie software developers (especially developers from the RSS era, if you've heard of MarsEdit or NetNewsWire). There's an emphasis on personal blogging, keeping things simple, and using dedicated desktop/mobile apps (usually made by solo/indie developers) for each task, instead of the website. And as part of the IndieWebCamp [2] projects, there's even people making web rings again [3] as well.
There was also a search engine someone showed on HN recently, that didn't have a crawler - the only pages listed were the specific pages (not domains!) that people submitted to the index. That gave the searches some serendipity, you never found what you searched for but stumbled on something that someone else thought was interesting anyway.
>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
http://wiby.me is a search engine that indexes pages like the ones you miss. Full disclosure though, I made it.
Ok, I like it. Throw in some homomorphic encryption in the future, and maybe we can reverse all this SaaSS nonsense of today.
I love the data stays owned by the user. It's how it should be. I hope the system has some provisions against applications encrypting the data on on user's POD.
Yeah :(. I just finished browsing the page and unfortunately, there's surprisingly little technical details about anything. Oh, you can build a client app with Angular. Cool. I'd much prefer to know how it all works.
Seems like a better marketed, but less-technically well thought out version of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io). Perhaps they should have acquired the IP from Kenton Varda.
I had the same thought. The hard parts really are the containerization of apps, and the auth and permissions model. Sandstorm as far as I know is the best thought out attempt at tackling those problems.
I like the idea. It's basically an encapsulated portable personal "wiki" for a user (persona) with an open data model that can be accessed by external apps based on permissions.
What it doesn't solve is the problem how this data is going to be used by those who access it. I wish there was some kind of digital contracts that only allow using personal data in a way permitted by the user.
Have you heard of the concept of "homomorphic encryption"? It allows someone to perform computations on encrypted pieces of data, without actually ever having access to the raw data itself.
I have no idea how realistic or how "possible" this technology is for in the near future, but this seems to be a great match for technologies like these.
Yup, it is. Though, I'm not sure about homomorphic encryption, but there has been some work on encryption in the academic community that has very clear application to Solid. Here's a paper written by some friends of mine: http://epub.wu.ac.at/5818/1/10.1007_978-3-319-58068-5_37.pdf
https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.2/acc... there are several emerging approaches to deliver that level of control over identity and artifacts. Each identity you provide to apps will have a root folder where you store the smart contract which maintains your sharing preferences and permissions. It's early days, but progress is being made, and it seems as if there will continue to be strong forces of co-opetition across the web3/indy web, and federated multi-verse. It will be interesting to see what kind of standards ultimately emerge and which community leads that charge.
I really would like to support this, but I seem to miss the big picture. Looking at the github repos, Solid appears to be mostly about giving a second life to TBL's and W3c's failed pet projects, notably semantic web, linked data, RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD.
What's wrong with bringing those back to life? Their organizing features have been unmatched by any application we have today, except maybe wikis.
They didn't fail for not being useful, but because their engineering was clunky and their demands on resources were way beyond the hardware of the time. Also those systems were too complex for the classic programming techniques. Now that we have a better understanding of reactive programming and async dependencies, maybe we can finally build the tools ecosystem to take advantage of homoiconic data, and these systems can take off.
I'm on mobile, so please excuse my innacurracie, but from memory how it works is pretty simple. A solid server is sort of like Dropbox. everything is a file, and you can give apps read-write access to a "folder".
It also recommends the use of some XML thing so that all your "contact" objects are the same format.
Sounds about right. Even if we imagine that developers adopt this technology for some reason, what's to stop them from also keeping copies of any data they are granted access to? or just using it for auth and giving you no direct access to your data? It all seems too idealistic, since developers derive little benefit from the added complexity.
Interesting idea, but I'm interested in the security implications. Now I have a Pod that has all my data in it, and I can host this pod anywhere I want. Great, but its now the single target for getting all data on me.
I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.
I believe (from scanning the website quickly) that you can host your own pod, but you can also put your data with third party. Currently, it offers 2 free options from a commercial provider and a community provider.
So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!
You are correct, but in this world I'm choosing a SINGLE third party to host ALL of my data. There's no distribution of risk, my data portfolio is undiversified, etc. They get hit, its all over.
In fairness, I guess I could have a bunch of pods like financial, social, pictures... or even a pod for each service: facebook_pod, bank1_pod, etc...and host them all with different third parties to try to minimize risk. But this gets incredibly cumbersome.
Any idea if data is encrypted by default? I didn't see any mention of encryption... or, TBH, much of anything other than rather ludicrous marketing language, which is very disappointing from TBL
Two years ago I wrote a little Progressive Web App which stores its data in an offline cache (browser) and syncs to my Nextcloud via WebDAV. IMHO that has pretty much the same advantages that Solid proclaims.
I mean, in spirit I seem to value the same things as Solid (decentralized, own your data, etc.), but what I don't understand is why it has to introduce so many abstract/new names when it wants to be 'simple'?
Building on top of the Semantic Web concepts isn't going to help either as it has enough disadvantages of its own (e.g., complex standards without adding any real value).
I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.
Something like Solid probably needs a strongly inforced GDPR in place. Otherwise big actors can just access all the private pods and cache them in their own big data stores, and we are back to square one.
I like the spirit of this, but expecting average internet users to buy fancy hard-drives to store their data for apps that don't exist yet, simply to be free of the cloud, is way optimistic.
Also, having a Solid pod does not prevent the worst kinds of personal data abuse, such as identity tracking and brokering of tracked data. I don't care that Facebook stores my photos, but I do care that they've built a profile around the contents of them.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadEDIT: at least there's the original outside medium on their project page, but seems like just a static squarespace page: https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web
So instead of posting a photo on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one would (ideally) authorize Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to read photos stored on the Pod with a "shared publicly" tag (or similar), and then anything with that tag would show up automatically in one's feed on all three sites, and (if also authorized) push reactions and comments back to the Pod.
If I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like a neat idea. I'll be interested to see how well it does.
I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the “build a solid app on your lunch break” link, and going all over the site, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of the actual engineering mechanisms, something is wrong.
It is hard for me to believe some consortium of really knowledgeable web architects and inventors made this. It feels like a PR website with attractive purple colors to make me feel cozy. But I want to know really how it works!
I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either.
The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver.
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408.
RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people.
Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.
The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet: 1. You cannot make people tell the truth. 2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth. 3. You cannot always make people do things the right way. 4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way.
So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."
The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person.
Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.
Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time.
The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user.
Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now.
OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.
Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use.
Ideas can take a long time to mature.
It’s impossible to find in the impenetrable marketing speak, but presumably the backend here is some off the shelf LDP? Existing LDPs tend towards being profoundly unscalable; typically the number of clients they can handle without choking per second is in the low single digits. All of the implementations I’ve seen are more concerned with adherence to an ill-conceived shitpile of “standardize-first, use-case later” W3C standards than ever tackling the core performance and protocol problems.
And I cannot imagine a worse choice for presenting Linked Data to the modern web than RDF. It’s ugly, dog-slow to parse, and is INCAPABLE of representing a simple ordered list without significantly painful work-arounds that practically by their nature force N+1 queries on to clients. JSON-LD solves a lot of this and has existed for years.
And then we’ve got yet another attempt to pretend the W3C’s WebACL spec is anything other than a lunatic’s fever-dream of a UI and UX nightmare. We’ll apparently just expose it to end users to let them manage their data. That’ll end well.
The Semantic Web Community’s biggest problem is that they think continually recreating “existing thing but with as many of these awful W3C standards as they can shoehorn in” is some kind of Good in and of itself, no matter how bad the resulting user experience would be.
Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.
For all the people lamenting the loss of the old internet, most of it is still there(irc,ftp,rss,ncurses email clients) -- you can still use it. You should probably ask yourself why you aren't.
Because there's no gopher client for macOS.
I bet if Google indexed Gopher sites at the outset, Gopher would still be a thing.
Gopher pretty much died long before Google was a thing. Here's a good article: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... (lots of interesting comments below the article from many of the people involved)
They have very little use. There's also a web proxy:
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw
Browsing it makes clear why Gopher would not still be a thing, except in the same sense that there are hobbyists who maintain Model Ts and steam engines and whatnot. For a time, Gopher was a miracle and a wonder. That time lasted about a year. The web does all it does and infinitely more.
There is a vibrant international community of people still on gopher, and a lot of us run our own servers. Check out gopher://gopherproject.org
There you'll find a getting started file, and other useful things such as a curated site listing (think DMOZ for gopher) called the Gopher Lawn.
But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The <script> and <applet> tags and now defunct concepts like VRML demonstrate that the "only static, only hypertext" version of the web you miss were more due to the primitive nature of an undeveloped platform than a state of grace and purity which has since been defiled by the ability to do computation on the web... the intent for the web to host both static and interactive content was there practically from the beginning.
>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
I don't. I like being able to watch videos and play games on the web, and buy things, and so on.
And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had. I know that's an unpopular sentiment to voice on HN, but as far as most end users are concerned, Reddit and Twitter and even Facebook are useful in ways that IRC and web chatrooms never were.
Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.
I don't think there's much structural about Yahoo Answers being what it is. I think it's mostly the population.
Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.
I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...
As exciting as those days were, I wouldn't want to go back to dial-up, CRT monitors, no-broadband, no-wi-fi, no-wikipedia, no-dropbox, no-stackoverflow, no-git, no-digital-distribution, etc.
And yes there was broadband in the old days. It just wasn't widely distributed. It was mostly at businesses and universities. As broadband became more common, web sites got needlessly heavier.
On the plus side, future generations will never know the horrors of a RealPlayer "Buffering..." message.
* Unless you really needed punch that monkey.
100% this. About 8 years ago, I had LIGHTNING fast loading times on every page I visited. 800-1000ms was average, on a connection that is slower than mine is today... Now 4-8 seconds is average, and the new Gmail takes 10-12 seconds to load.
I'm nostalgic for the days when the web was faster and more functional than it is today.
As for figuring out how to turn the web into an app platform, Netscape and Sun might have gotten farther in the 90s if it wasn't for Microsoft. There used to be a saying in the 2000s that MS held back technology for a decade.
There's also something about the snappiness of desktop apps on hardware 1/100th the speed of what we're running now that I dearly miss.
I don't understand the premise. Tumblr is / was over ten times larger than Geocities. It did what you're describing. It was still wildly popular with young people just as recently as a few years ago.
With Geocities you could see millions of high school art students demonstrating for the entire world that they don't know the first thing about design or color.
Tumblr is the epitome of a walled garden. The flowers look pretty, but you still have to plant them in neat, orderly rows. Even Facebook's Pieces of Flair offered more of a creative outlet.
You can still make oversized blinking purple Comic Sans text on a black background above an animated "Under Construction" GIF. But you have to do it in CSS.
They've moved to DeviantArt now.
Douglas Adams expressed this well:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.
Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.
I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.
The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.
Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.
One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
It's not just age, it's a sense of loss. I can still go down to the store and buy milk in bag form, just as I could when I was a kid, so I don't feel nostalgic about it even though it's old. I feel nostalgic about the web of my youth because that place is gone now and it'll likely never come back.
In tech circles we like to obsess over new technologies and all of the amazing new possibilities they've brought. We don't spend nearly as much time talking about all we've lost.
This created space for passionate amateurs to create content for their niche. You got wonderfully personalized, quirky sites that didn’t look weird or suspicious and, importantly, actually got traffic (or what passed for a decent amount of traffic at the time.)
The rise of Google, security issues, “walled gardens”, blogging platforms, and YouTube have basically ended the ability of a new amateur site to get a significant amount of new traffic. Internet stardom has moved to YouTube, Twitter or more specialized communities like Reddit, StackExhange, or Wikipedia. The Wikia networks have driven out most need for fan sites. Social networks are a better sharing mechanism than personal blogs meant for keeping friends and family up to date.
This all has had the effect that the internet “feels” far more structured and professionalized than its early days, and IMO is much more a “winner take all” environment for content. I miss the amateur web the same reason I go to high school sports and watch low ranked college football teams- the play may not be as good, but passion is the same, the games feel more human and occasionally you see unexpected flashes of brilliance, beauty, and serendipity that you’ll never see in the professional world.
90% of the web apps that are useful to me would be equally useful as native local apps with local data. As a native MacOS or iOS program they would be hugely faster, without latency, and just as useful out of signal area (still common enough that it happens daily for me).
That would leave me to choose which I wanted to sync either internally or via something like dropbox.
Most of the innovations in the browser that enable apps also promote and enable tracking, auto start videos, and JS loaded ads, and use of the browser as surrogate OS. Mostly I find this a serious misstep. I don't miss bad design and sites that were cut up bits of image etc.
Definitely! There's a lot of that sentiment over at Micro.blog [1], which has built a community of writers & indie software developers (especially developers from the RSS era, if you've heard of MarsEdit or NetNewsWire). There's an emphasis on personal blogging, keeping things simple, and using dedicated desktop/mobile apps (usually made by solo/indie developers) for each task, instead of the website. And as part of the IndieWebCamp [2] projects, there's even people making web rings again [3] as well.
There was also a search engine someone showed on HN recently, that didn't have a crawler - the only pages listed were the specific pages (not domains!) that people submitted to the index. That gave the searches some serendipity, you never found what you searched for but stumbled on something that someone else thought was interesting anyway.
[1] https://micro.blog
[2] https://indieweb.org/
[3] http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/i-made-a-web-ring-5-days-ago...
http://wiby.me is a search engine that indexes pages like the ones you miss. Full disclosure though, I made it.
Ok, I like it. Throw in some homomorphic encryption in the future, and maybe we can reverse all this SaaSS nonsense of today.
I love the data stays owned by the user. It's how it should be. I hope the system has some provisions against applications encrypting the data on on user's POD.
What it doesn't solve is the problem how this data is going to be used by those who access it. I wish there was some kind of digital contracts that only allow using personal data in a way permitted by the user.
I have no idea how realistic or how "possible" this technology is for in the near future, but this seems to be a great match for technologies like these.
They didn't fail for not being useful, but because their engineering was clunky and their demands on resources were way beyond the hardware of the time. Also those systems were too complex for the classic programming techniques. Now that we have a better understanding of reactive programming and async dependencies, maybe we can finally build the tools ecosystem to take advantage of homoiconic data, and these systems can take off.
I do think that the Semantic Web is still a cool idea though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764
It also recommends the use of some XML thing so that all your "contact" objects are the same format.
I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.
So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!
In fairness, I guess I could have a bunch of pods like financial, social, pictures... or even a pod for each service: facebook_pod, bank1_pod, etc...and host them all with different third parties to try to minimize risk. But this gets incredibly cumbersome.
I mean, in spirit I seem to value the same things as Solid (decentralized, own your data, etc.), but what I don't understand is why it has to introduce so many abstract/new names when it wants to be 'simple'?
Building on top of the Semantic Web concepts isn't going to help either as it has enough disadvantages of its own (e.g., complex standards without adding any real value).
I hesitate to call it outright bad, but I have no idea what to do after I create a pod. And I'm someone who knows how to write Solidity.
You could even mix data from different schemas in the same document, using something like namespaces.
Like, some kind of extensible markup language, almost.
Also, having a Solid pod does not prevent the worst kinds of personal data abuse, such as identity tracking and brokering of tracked data. I don't care that Facebook stores my photos, but I do care that they've built a profile around the contents of them.