Hello folks,
TL:DR
- Solid enables a dencentralized, user owned data storage and SSO
- ActivityPods adapts its functionality to the fediverse
Slowly, things have smoothed out for the fediverse and it has become an everyday thing or even a new home on the internet for many of us. And yet I still don’t feel that I can utilise the full potential of this network.
One of the biggest arguments in favour of the fediverse has always been that you can communicate with all other services regardless of which service you use and that it doesn’t really matter where you register because you still receive all the messages. The reality is often disappointing.
Once registered with a service, you can communicate with all other services, but unfortunately often not in the format for which the other media were created. If you then try to log in to another instance with your account, you will also be disappointed - it simply doesn’t work.
What we are really missing is a SingleSingOn (SSO) solution with which you can log in to any instance and any service. And it already exists! Meet the Solid project.
Solid (Social Linked Data) is a web decentralization project led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The project “aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy” by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users’ control. (Source: Wikipedia, Solid)
In short: Solid stores all your data in a decentralised data store called “pod”. Anyone can host their own pod or use a pod provider. The user can then decide which data is made available to which service and can adjust it centrally at any time without much effort. This is also accompanied by the authentication method through WebID, which is handled via the Solid OIDC protocol.
Solid is designed to revolutionise the entire internet, but specifically for the fediverse there is ActivityPods, which aims to combine the advantages of Solid with the nature of the fediverse. This project will probably be the one that will give us the long-awaited interoperability thanks to SSO. And probably as early as this year!
Good to hear something about Solid again. I was aware of it already (having Sir Tim Berners-Lee behind it makes it occasionally news-worthy) but it’s really not made any ripples that I’ve noticed recently. It seems to be ticking slowly along, but I think until we can get a good look at ActivityPods 2.0 it’s hard to get too excited.
Yeah I’m following ActivityPods development for quite some time and although its slow the is some progress made. I wanted to use this post to inform people and generate a little enthusiasm for the project.
Will it work with current apps like Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube etc? I couldn’t find any data about it.
Solid is just the protocol. ActivityPods is the adaptation for the fediverse and thus should work with any service on this network. So yes, one account for all of them.
I think apps would need to be rewritten from the ground up with ActivityPods as a basis instead of every software’s ActivityPub implementation. Very interesting technology and it definitely does solve a shortcoming that the Fediverse tends to have at the moment. (Mastodon sorta has a SSO implementation of its own but other services lack it and it’s quite the issue). But I am afraid most Fedi developers won’t rebuild their apps just for this.
Will existing projects have to adapt their codebases to work with ActivityPods? I assume yes.
Probably. But it shouldn’t be much of a hurdle.
