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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Does anyone know anything about Solid pods? (solidproject.org)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I heard about this project years ago. Cool concept: standardized, interchangeable storage + identity that can be plugged into arbitrary apps. The idea is that your identity is tied to your data, and your data can be hosted anywhere so you can retain control over your data or use a simple provider. It was also created by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web.

However, it doesn't seem to be gaining traction anywhere, even in the already-niche self-hosting community. From the GitHub (which was hard to find on the website!) I could see that it's being actively developed, including a new website redesign, but everything else seems stagnant. Their newsletter has no updates since 2021. There are only a small handful of apps listed on the site and most of them haven't been maintained since 2019 or earlier, and a lot are just things like "solid pod explorer" or "demo app".

Anyone had any experience with it? Or know more about the situation? I would love to see this become more widely used.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Maybe there is more development going on in individual projects? ActivityPods which combines ActivityPub accounts with Solid Pods for identity management — and AFAICT it was last updated two days ago.

I have to say I'm still not clear on exactly what and how Berners-Lee & co intend us to use Solid. Presumably the pod providers are more reliable than Google or Meta, but they're still unknown third parties to me? Should we self host our pods? That's only a power outage away from becoming a real nightmare.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Self hosting and syncing data to a 3rd party would give you total control of your data and data resiliency.

Sounds like a good combo that's lacking now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Happy to see ActivityPods, never heard of it before but was thinking that would be cool!

I don't think they're necessarily meant to be self-hosted, although they can be. The point is to decentralize and take control over your data. Will happily explain more when I sober up :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh no wait, am I too late for the drunk version? 🙂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I think I found a parallel in Bluesky's Personal Data Server concept — here's a nice writeup. I still don't know most of the ActivityPod providers from Adam, so atm I can't tell whether I actually have control of my data using their services, or if they do 🤷