[andrewrothman]

I have mixed feelings about Solid. I really love the ideas behind it, and having Tim Berners-Lee (big name in tech) at the helm is a huge plus. However, I have some trouble with some of the technical choices, like RDF/Turtle. Given that most web developers are familiar with JSON, and many web APIs / services talk JSON exclusively, I feel like that should be the default recommended choice. Given that there is a lot of semantic web data already in RDF, I think that format should be supported, but not encouraged going forward.

I also think it's clear that Google and Facebook are not going to want to give up control of this data, and are highly incentivized to provide the best and cheapest services they can to keep users on their platforms. People are used to keeping their stuff in Google Drive, and wouldn't move it unless there was an easy way to do so and a good reason to even think about doing that.

I'm excited to see where it goes though, as centralization is a big problem on the web today. I try to self-host my own personal data but it's so hard to work with it in nice consumer apps. For example, I'd love to see CalDAV and CardDAV supported in Android, but for now I need to use DAVx⁵ to sync my info, and it doesn't seem to show up in Outlook for Android after years of requests to Microsoft for the feature.

I'd really like to hear other thoughts on this, as I'd love to see Solid succeed. Anyone working on Solid in this thread?

[Vinnl]

Note that currently, the Solid spec mandates both RDF/Turtle and RDF/JSON (JSON-LD). That said, it's perfectly possible for an app to read/write any data format they choose, but RDF deals with some challenges regarding data discovery and interoperability, and allows for more granular updates with smaller payloads.

(I also work at Inrupt, though views are my own.)