DevCon talk Supercharging the SAFE Network with Project Solid

Development
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A bit of both really. I took a lot of time away working on SAFE Drive, SAFE git, and dWeb Blog while Maidsafe have been researching ways to implement RDF storage, SPARQL etc, and building experimental RDF and WebID APIs.

Recently I got back on the Solid horse and have made some great progress which I hope to show before long. I know Maidsafe have been talking to some folk about RDF etc (all public) and I think are ramping up a bit in that area.

Discussions with people on the Solid chat and forums are ad hoc and ongoing, including with Tim who was asking questions about SAFE again last week. He, Inrupt, Ruben & Co are all very busy getting their stuff together though, so not much time for working with other projects AFAIK.

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As Mark said, he is really working close with both projects and then there are a few SAFE folk on gitter from time to time, with Tim et all’ I suspect when we build stuff that works on a network that is running publicly then it will start to manifest into a close relationship.

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David & Mark, thank you both for your reactions :smiley:

I have been following silently over the last year, but with an ever growing excitement.

I feel the bases of this project is becoming so robust and solid, that once it will be ready all the nay-sayers will be blown out of the water!

Thank you and the whole team for all the great work that is going on at SAFE :+1:

Good luck with the next Milestone “Fleming”!
Andre

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So I’ve heard Tim Berners-Lee’s (TBL’s) Solid could have a synergy with SAFE. I’ve also heard that SAFE could, technically, come up with its own solution, without help from Solid—if so desired.

I wonder if, despite the above fact that SAFE could work its own solution : having a team-up with TBL would be the ultimate solution. This would be for the fact that it would more easily work its way into our world’s history, considering that there are already millions of people that know TBL designed the current Internet in the 90’s.

I only bring all this up because I just mentioned the idea of SAFE in a chat-room with 300 people, and it is the first time I’ve ever felt the most comfortable to bring up SAFE at all, as part of the flow of conversation at the time.

Solid teaming with SAFE is currently the majority’s perception in this forum, and elsewhere, last I checked. I know, though, that it is likely there are pockets of people who want Maidsafe to solo everything. I think, if hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands (and beyond) of people are to be reached, the only solution – possibly at all – is to carry the work and ego of TBL’s character who already has clout with these many upon many people of the world. It helps that both projects compliment each other (as said again below) instead of forcing partnership solely for clout reasons.

This all might be odd to bring up, considering there’s already a moderate push to mention Solid along with SAFE. There might be some arguments against it. Although, based on the Solid discussion threads abound, it looks like there is some kind of wholly complementing synergy between the two. Anyway, just something to think about when bringing up SAFE’s Idea to the world instead of just the choir.

(Here’s the exact thing I typed in the chat-room: “hopefully 2020 is all about global autonomous decentralized distributed multi-+cross-encrypted quantum-proof internet reinvented by tim berner’s lee and maidsafe”. Finally finishing the proofread message I was proud of the knowledge of the feelings that unsuspecting readers would have upon wondering what in the world this “Maidsafe” entity is.)

Originally typed this in the price/trading topic, so it’s worded strangely maybe.

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I think you covered things well @Audity and I’ll update where we are with this for me as I’ve not done so for a while.

Status of Solid on SAFE

Collaboration

Both projects and communities are aware of each other, though there is not close collaboration on a common goal at this point. I do get regular help from them, and help out there with Solid enquiries myself, and sometimes we get into discussing SAFE network and what myself and Maidsafe are doing wrt Solid and LinkedData.

There is gradual education and mutual understanding, alongside synergies (which are very strong IMO) and some significant differences in approach (eg wrt servers).

Both projects are focused on their vision with lots of work going on to get the parts in place, so there isn’t much bandwidth for collaboration at this point. This is why I’m content that we are managing to get mutual education and some familiarity on a personal level.

To support that I’m active in the Solid chat and forum, as are others from SAFE from time to time.

Maidsafe and Solid / LinkedData

Maidsafe have done a great deal to dig into RDF/LinkedData which underlies Solid, and have laid the groundwork for impending support for this in the core and API. Much still to do, and possibly low priority for a while, this has been very useful and valuable in various ways, including providing me with ways to integrate Solid apps seamlessly with SAFE Browser.

Me and Solid on SAFE

Twitter

As well as hanging with the Solid community, I dedicated my Safepress twitter account to promoting Solid on SAFE gathering together follows and followers in privacy, security, decentralisation, LinkedData, Solid etc, including TimBL, Ruben Verborgh and others.

Since the DevCon my follows have grown steadily to over 1,800. I am selective in who I follow (around 200), which means my follows are not just ‘follows back’, but mostly people who do follow! I also get involved with web frameworks there (eg React, React-static, sveltejs) tools and services etc which relate to SAFE and building things on SAFE.

This is a very SAFE focused account and has achieved good reach in the privacy and decentralisation space. If you are on twitter, you can help by following and RTs of https://mobile.twitter.com/safepress

Solid apps on SAFE

On the practical front I’ve continued with the approach described at the start of this topic which was demonstrated at the SAFE DevCon last year.

That was a demo of capability but not easy for others to adopt. My aim is that anyone be able to take a Solid app and run it on SAFE.

Since the DevCon I’ve been extending the work to cover authorisation, and providing SAFE compatible versions of the Solid libraries.

I’m still working on this, but have a Solid file manager app working on SAFE mock, by substituting a modified version of one Solid library (solid-auth-client).

My aim is to demonstrate this Solid file manager app on SAFE (along with one or two others) to the Solid community, and encourage some of the developers to join the SAFE test network to try them out.

There are some hurdles to this, but the principle is shown to work. I need a bit of help from Maidsafe (unlikely for a while), or maybe others in the community who can dig into SAFE Browser which has some limitations, and I need to do some more work on my part too so that Solid apps can work with SAFE WebIDs (also working but with some limitations).

Earlier I did some work on the Solid Plume blog app to fix some bugs and make it easy to deploy on Solid, and my fork is now the version of Plume listed on the Solid apps page.

So despite the relative silence a lot of work is going on to help bring Solid and SAFE together! :slight_smile:

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Great little update Mark! So stoked to you’ve been maintaining momentum on this to bring together the two communities.

I’m curious on how SAFE WebIDs might also work with DIDs. When I have some bandwidth I’d be keen to delve deeper on this area.

Again, thanks for the efforts!

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Anything that can be done to bring SAFE and Solid together will be great.

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Critical for SAFE Web IDs to work with DID. We need to stay aligned with global standards to increase (and support) adoption.

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is this still valid? will Tim Berner-Lee cooperate in the future with Maid to bring Solid to SAFE? I mean many months have past away maybe so something changed.

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Nothing has changed in that respect. Putting Solid on SAFE is paused until the browser API stabilises so I’m having fun with other things - you can see this if you follow the forums here and on Solid.

You really do sound like Starsmick, are you related?

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Are you asking me? Didnt find anything about Starsmick on google, who is he?

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I did :wink: …

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Nice one David :+1:

So we have:

  • uncanny similarities between their posts
  • a claim debunked in minutes when asked about this
  • uncanny coincidence of memento arriving when Starsmick left

We can draw some comfort from the level of amateurism.

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