How It Works | Solid

09 Oct 2018 • solid.inrupt.com

Within the Solid ecosystem, you decide where you store your data. Photos you take, comments you write, contacts in your address book, calendar events, how many miles you run each day from your fitness tracker… they’re all stored in your Solid POD. This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice. Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time, without interruption of service.

You give people and your apps permission to read or write to parts of your Solid POD. So whenever you’re opening up a new app, you don’t have to fill out your details ever again: they are read from your POD with your permission. Things saved through one app are available in another: you never have to sync, because your data stays with you.

I think “never have to sync” sounds a bit optimistic… this is going to require apps to start thinking in whole new ways about data (and their lack of ownership of it)… and how would you build something like Facebook on top of Solid POD?

Very curious to see where this goes. The current “everything is a silo” approach sure has it’s downsides.