Tim Berners Lee's Inrupt

@jonrichter is SolidBase related to the Solid semantic web project? Or coincidental?

Yes, the naming is coincidental. But it is not coincidental that I have chosen the SoLiD stack as identity and data provider.

@jonrichter how are you getting along with Solid as identity and data provider? More to see somewhere?
@ivan116 of our multiple-parallel P2P economic network projects is also Solid-curious and would be interested in an experience report, or some side conversation.

Thank you! As a curious sociologist I will get a look with great interest.
Vincenzo Giorgino

I read the FastCompany article as slightly -- well -- skeptical? Admittedly it's nice to get TBL as leading one of the projects in this area, but I must confess when I last watched a video of TBL I was underwhelmed, and felt he may have passed his best. Which is a pity for W3C. What impression to others get? I mean, if it's genuinely good, let's go for it, but how do we tell if it is any better than other initiatives? TimBL's name alone doesn't do it for me.

I couldn't read the fast company article because of all the videos autoplaying in the right panel with gesticulating crazy people.
But their blog post tells me a couple of things:
1. They are focused on business startups, and
2. they claim to have created some easy dev tools for apps.

Solid has been one of my potential infrastructure possibilities since it first emerged, but I couldn't get anything running reliably then, so I lost interest.

Now they might have their tech act together, but I don't want to play in a VC startup ballgame.

But I give TBL some respect. In the Solid dev chats, he was hands-on. And he's been trying to get money for his vision for 20+ years. Melvin Carvalho is the only dev onboard that I have interacted with, but he seemed like good and collaborative to me.

So, mixed review...will be interested in @jonrichter 's experience.

I see the same things as @bobhaugen Also, as a commons-oriented 'mere user' I see 3 things . .

• The initiative sits very much in dev territory, It's good to see the library of tools - looks like they're really trying to help devs to fly with this. But despite 'for the people' rhetoric there's quite a gulf between the present Inrupt community and the life of folks like me who don't hack code or run servers. Same old same old.

• Devs in corporates will exploit the Inrupt infratsructure, for sure - they'll be happy to have private data networks. Libertarian TBL doesn't mind? But there's an opportunity at this early stage, to emphasise small apps running on low-tech devices for non-tech poor users, as @mfioretti was emphasising here. Anybody feel like picking up the SOLID ball now and running with it, to make such an ecosystem?

• The new TBL company could be another gitHub > Microsoft waiting to happen? Might anybody want to open a coop-owned repository for SOLID apps & tools? Maybe specialised in small apps for poor folks? Relates to @strypey here? Maybe an "app store" platform, with eco benefits over very many servers, as @mfioretti was pointing up?

My hesitation about playing in a VC-financed game is that I want a cooperative software ecosystem where all the members play nicely with each other, and are friends.

I doubt that VC financing will lead to that. I see conflicts over money in other communities with much less on the table than VC money.

I guess that's why I was floating the coop repo idea. Could it be possible to initiate a parallel coop-commons oriented community, hacking on open source SOLID code & protocols, without geting snared in VC politics and InRupt corporate compromises? I dunno. Surely the free code base enables this, if somebody has the energy to underpin the alternative with labour? Now, who has a spare 3 days per week . . . and the FLOSS experience to surf this wave?

Among the OAE people who are focused on economic networks, we currently have one project going on ActivityPub and another on SSB. And are talking to Holochain about another potential project.

I had Solid on my short list 2 years ago, but this makes me less interested, although I do appreciate that they seem to have some usable code. But if Jon and gang are trying it out, they could change my mind.