decided to look into #solid (the Tim Berners-Lee related one) and, why the hell isn't it in everything by now, or at least able to be?!
Like, why can't I have my files on a Solid pod show up in Nautilus yet?!
In particular, I think it might be really great for a "metaverse passport," a common ID that would include a display name and avatars, and you could potentially use Solid's existent profile and friends stuff too.
There are definitely a few unfortunate shortcomings with Solid as an ecosystem at the moment:
The default web UI, apart from the login process, feels really clunky. Some clever CSS could probably completely fix this.
It looks like it's still rather difficult to host your own pod server; they say it's possible but don't tell you how to do it, instead just saying it's not for the faint of heart.
It would be great if I could connect a local file server, maybe even one hidden on a local network, or host on multiple pod servers for redundancy of my own data.
Is there a way to set up multi-factor authentication or Passkeys yet?
Other improvements I think could be made:
A server's home/login page should list a few apps, perhaps configurable by the server administrator (...within Solid itself, of course). A file manager, Penny, and an inbox viewer would be great here.
I feel like setting up the inbox as one append-only Resource would be a good idea. Or, you get even more advanced with the ACL, and have it so that each authorized app can see all its own inbox entries.
Someone should make a Solid file manager plugin, maybe even with metadata support, for Nautilus and Dolphin, at least. You sign in and authenticate with your pod server, and your available Pods all show up as network filesystems (if there are multiple, they should probably all not be on the sidebar, but if there's just one it's fine).
Seeing as it's been in development for 8 or more years and it's not out of the experimental phase yet, I don't expect it'll ever come to light, but if it does, yeah this could very well change the world...!
I take back the "default web UI" being clunky. The IDP pages look great; the home pages do not, but that should be easily fixable with a simple index.html, which should be hosted on Solid.
I wonder if any Podserver out there can host a pod container (folder) as a website? i.e. just host the files in the folder, ignoring any content-empty ones? That would be a good use for Solid as well. Hell, give it a Gemini interface, host Gemtext on it!
...You know what, what if I did just that? What if I wrote a Gemini interface to Solid? Could I do that? I don't mean (just) an app, it would have to handle the login and maybe registration too, so you can do it all within Gemini itself. That would at least have to interface with the podserver with elevated permissions...
I also take back that second paragraph (most of it). I'm not 100% sure how but there is a mechanism for hosting webpages on a Solid podserver, because solid.redpencil.io (which is the one I'm using) does have apps hosted on it. Maybe this is default behavior for world-readable files (or, folders with index.html?)
Can you use XSLT with RDF? Like, to build a static site or blog type thing with it?
It would be nice if some servers could also pre-render XSLTs on Solid things, so you could have a Web-log and a Gemini-log from the same source (discriminating by output type, probably), or a pretty profile page rendered off of your ~/profile/card#me...
Hey, what if I went a little further and let Things have RDF-marked redirects and headers, executed by the server, basically an equivalent of the Cloudflare Pages _redirects and _headers file formats?
Could you set up a server so that some external domain can get A/AAAA/CNAME'd to it and it serves a pod from it? I'm thinking, a podserver is hosted on fightingthe.foo or something and you could have podname.fightingthe.foo host the actual pods themselves? Or, even better, let people use, say, example.cloud to host their pod and make it available at personal.website, maybe as a kind of alias? Or, maybe just host a sub-folder there, so you can use it as web hosting... the possibilities are endless!
@blake there's many reasons, to be honest, between "RDF is hard" (it has a steep learning curve), to Inrupt basically having a stranglehold on development (disclaimer: I used to work for Inrupt), to no one knows what it is: to some it's a quadstore, and they really hate the fact Inrupt stuck a file/resource interface on it.
The focus is on selling this to corporations rather than making a good platform for everyday users.
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