Open-Source Discovery: Solid

„You’re joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.“

Tim Berners-Lee

What is Solid?

Solid is a project for the decentralization of the World Wide Web, which is led by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The project is being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project “aims to radically change the way web applications work, which leads to real sovereignty over one’s own data and better user privacy”. This is to be achieved through the development of a decentralized and fully user-controlled platform.

Solid stands for Social Linked Data, which holds meta information referring to other data and identities.

Solid’s focus is on using and sharing information in a way that preserves privacy.

How it works

A user stores personal data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted where the user desires. Applications that are authenticated by Solid are allowed to request data if the user grants the application permission. A user can distribute personal information among multiple pods; For example, different pods can contain personal profile information, contact information, financial information, health, travel plans, or other information. The user can then take advantage of an authenticated social networking application by giving it permission to access the related information in a particular pod. The user retains complete ownership and control of the data in their pods: specifically, what data is in each pod, where each pod is stored, and which applications have permission to use the data.

The Solid Ecosystem depends on the following parts:

• Collection of Standards: Identity, authentication, login, authorization lists, contact management, messaging, feed subscriptions, comments, and discussions.
• Solid Server: Which implements the Solid specification
• Test suite for testing and validating Solid implementations
• A system of social applications, identity providers, and auxiliary libraries that run on the Solid platform.
• A huge community with documentation, discussions, tutorials and presentations

How we use Solid

The project is still in active development, we plan to use Solid for a privacy-focused storage solution for sensitive data. Solid’s focus on decentralization and privacy perfectly matches our values. It is backed up by standards and specifications, written by experienced World Wide Web professors, developers, and inventors.

The Open Source contributor Florian Fromm initiates the implementation of the Solid specification in Rust. Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language focused on performance and safety. It’s developed by Mozilla and backed up with sponsoring by big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The solid.rs implementation is in the pre-alpha phase and under active development. Want to contribute? Join our Discord, and say hello in the #solid channel.

Want to learn more?

• Website: https://solidproject.org/
• The Solid Ecosystem Specification: https://solid.github.io/specification/#pod-management
• Github: https://github.com/solid
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/project_solid
• Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data (TED Talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo