Who decides what your Solid pod looks like? For a long time, the answer has been the first one who writes, decides. That is, the first app to sculpt documents and containers in your pod determines where other apps need to look for data. Unfortunately, this creates an undesired dependency between apps, which now have to agree amongst each other on how to store things. Yet Solid promises apps that will seamlessly and independently reuse data in order to provide us with better and safer experien...| ruben.verborgh.org
We’re living in a data-driven economy, and that won’t change anytime soon. Companies, start-ups, organizations, and governments all require some of our data to provide us with the services we want and need. Unfortunately, decades of Big Data thinking has led many companies to a consequential fallacy: the belief that they need to harvest and maintain that personal data themselves in order to deliver their services and thus survive in the data-driven economy. This prompted a never-ending ra...| ruben.verborgh.org
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed bac...| ruben.verborgh.org