[polyphonicist]

> Even if you do hand your pod over to some company, it'll be like letting them host your domain name or manage your cell phone number. If you don't like what they're doing, you can always move your pod -- just like you can take your cell phone number and move to a different carrier. This will give users a lot more power.

The domain name analogy scares me rather than reassures me. Sure, DNS was created in good faith to be as distributed as possible, but is it? There are recent stories that show that individuals do not have as much control on domain names as one would ideally like. See these stories -

- Sinkholed: https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/ (domain name hijack by German authority by accident)

- The duck tape holding the internet together: https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-inte... (loss of control on domain name due to registrar error)

While the idea behind Solid sounds solid but the moment they talk about outsourcing pod hosting to third-party pod hosting providers, I get worried. Would it lead to walled gardens of pods? (Example GMail for emails) Would they add non-standard convenience features to create vendor lock-ins (Example GitHub for Git)? Would they abuse their power due to vendor lock-in (Example Sourceforge for SVN)?

[onion2k]

I think the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here - expecting something to never go wrong just means you'll never ship anything. Pods will break in ways that no one can foresee. That's not good, but giving up and not trying would be worse, so users and businesses will have to deal with those problems as best they can.

Don't forget that millions of domain transfers happen every year without going wrong. There are cases like the ones you linked to, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule, thankfully.

[troquerre]

On the domain name analogy, there are now decentralized DNS initiatives like handshake.org that are trying to make domain names truly distributed, which may make for a better analogy for solid. I agree that DNS in its current implementation is not well distributed as you've pointed out.