[mikedc]

Philosophically, and in the long-term, Solid is compelling to me for all of the reasons that the project purports to exist. But we have a classic chicken-and-egg problem with the absence of both reputable pod providers and the development of an application ecosystem.

Practically, and immediately, it is compelling to me as a developer of small-ish applications (plugins, etc.) in which I want to give users the ability to store some data (preferences, etc.) in the cloud without my having to manage that data, or the associated services/infrastructure - including having to deal with absorbing or recouping the cost.

Dropbox once offered the Datastore API[0], which was a handy little bring-your-own-database service allowing apps read/write access to a key/value store in a user's account (Dropbox accounts being quite common then), but it was deprecated[1] due to lack of traction at the time.

[0] https://dropbox.tech/developers/the-datastore-api-a-new-way-...

[1] https://dropbox.tech/developers/deprecating-the-sync-and-dat...