Doesnt SAFE do what SOLID is doing anyway? Why would SOLID need to run on top of SAFE?
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No, they are quite different. Solid is a way of making data independent from applications so you can store your personal data where you like. It uses HTTP and doesnāt provide for encryption so doesnāt really have security built in at all, wheras security is what SAFE is all about.
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The SAFE network can have apps that store information about the user, or apps that allow the user to store the information himself. For example the project decorum should be like the Solidā¦ only a skin for the user information.
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Thanks.
Is it planned for SOLID to run on SAFE though?
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Yes it is and lots of very hard work happening to ensure this is a minimum.
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The big wins of SAFE are security, privacy, data ownership, and decentralised services. Users in control and a level playing field for developers, who donāt have to shell out for infrastructure, and can make money without having to charge, show ads etc.
Solid aims for some of these goals, but is sever and service based, so I donāt think that on its own Solid can achieve them at scale, and will always be a poor second to SAFE.
In fact I think that as is, Solid would rapidly become centralised if it gained mass adoption, and we would be no better off. There are different views on this over on the Solid chat and forum, some see the problem some donāt. Assuming Iām right, then the earlier they see this the better, but even if they donāt we can still take their work and integrate it with SAFE Network because at its heart Solid is a protocol and some standards, and the code is open source.
However, the big win of Solid is that it separates the app from data much better than SAFE can alone. In other words, the user owns the data, and can at any time switch from one app and use another, without loss of service. Try that with Facebook!
This is a BIG deal because it means apps will have to compete on features and not by trying to capture and control our personal data. It turns the business models inside out, and will make it possible for independent app developers - even individuals - to compete with Facebook, Google and Co.
Solid makes it feasible for one app to read, write and mash up the data of another app. The data itself will be much more useful as LinkedData (RDF), because apps will be able to understand and query it based on semantics that are inherent in LinkedData. This means more powerful apps. Lots of innovation. Much better services for users, competing to do a better job for users instead of treating users as the product.
This aspect of Solid is genius, and a very big deal IMO. Put Solid and SAFE together and you have an incredible combination.
If you are interested in what Solid brings to SAFE and how this might work, may I humbly suggest [cough] my presentation to SAFE Network DevCon earlier this year. Its a short video (12mins) or you can click through a longer set of slides which I hope are fairly self explanatory. See:
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I wouldnāt agree with this, unless what we are trying to say is that you can have data from clearnet shared and not just from the SAFE network?
The SAFE network allows this in a similar level already, and we can argue if the utilities and APIs available are good enough on one or the other project, but thatās totally different aspect to saying that the SAFE Network itself alone cannot allow the separation of data from apps as much as Solid. We had even demonstrated some months ago that the data can be totally separated form the apps in the SAFE Network by showing Patter vs NoPatter. Unless Iām misunderstanding that statement?
Another example is probably your safe-fuse app, any other app can already read those files because you are following the NFS convention to store them (and we want to migrate to RDF rather than having our own NFS convention/format).
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Gabriel, I agree with you that in theory SAFE could enable apps access to data from other apps, and we could establish our own standards and protocol to do this without Solid.
I donāt think SAFE Drive achieves this, because it is access without understanding, and my point about Solid is that it is an established set of protocols and standards that achieve this right now and are our best bet for mass adoption.
So we could in theory go our own way and achieve this without Solid, but I donāt see any sense in that.
Hereās how I put it back in March:
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Correct, but we are not, we are going the same way, with RDF and linked-data, which is not exactly Solid but using the same standards just like Solid does, decoupling apps from data. Note this is not a theory, it already is decoupled in SAFE.
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Iām interested, are you thinking there might be advantages to not support Solid protocol, not support Solid apps (but cherry pick some subset of the underlying tech)?
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What do you mean by Solid protocol? I mean, which one exactly? we are going the path to support the same protocols, right?
EDIT: what I meant was that we are not going our own way with standards/protocols.
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Sorry if Iām being vague, I was just wondering if you had a different direction in mind. So let me say what I think and maybe you can critique.
Iām lazy, everything Iāve tried to do in terms of building stuff on SAFE has been informed by my wish to get as much bang for as little effort as possible. A big part of this has been trying to re-use the efforts of others as much as possible, and in this instance this includes the standards we think are valuable (such as RDF, SPARQL, Turtle/JSON-LD where applicable), and the apps people are building on top of those.
This was embodied in my demo:
- look what these standards allow
- look we can take existing Solid apps and they can run on SAFE
So when I said āprotocolā, I meant the platform really (but with SAFE replacing the backend / Pod servers/services).
So when you were saying, SAFE can allow apps to mix and mash each othersā data without Solid, I wondered if you were envisaging something different, or if you were just pointing out that, yes, of course we donāt have to follow Solid or support Solid apps, which is certainly true.
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I think we are on the same page, Iām just trying to be explicit and clarify that you can already build apps which are 100% decoupled from data on SAFE network, regardless if your app is a Solid app using SAFE as a POD, or if your app is a 100% SAFE app.
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I recently thought about if there are something like skype meetings between Maidsafe and importent contributors like happybeing, mav, oetyng and others? I was thinking it maybe could be beneficial in ways like knowing where projects are right now, where it is going, visions, what is needed/wanted, wishes for future and so on. The meetings could be structured or unstructured but maybe it could be beneficial in atleast to get a full overview between key contributors and Maidsafe. As you guys have this discussion i thought it might be a good oportunity to propose this suggestion.
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Hi Guys, I would like to have clear these things:
Maybe more options are possible, but users are usually quite careless, so what all they have to done to use SoLiD or other app based on this platform?
If user will use SoLiD, he will download SoLiD app and to let it run on SAFE he will download " SAFE support package" ?
SoLid itself have built some social platform and if you want use different it has to be SoLiD compatible. Than again you wil need SoLiD+SAFE+DIFFERENT ONE ?
Thank you.
Iād like to have these clear too 
They are important questions, but not easy to know at this stage. The closer we are able to work with the Solid team the better or easier this kind of thing can be, and we just donāt know how that will pan out. For now weāre working more in parallel than in collaboration (though there is already some and I hope that will grow), which would mean the solutions will have common features and abilities, and it will be easy to move data and apps between Solid on Web and Solid on SAFE. But it will need extra work to make this seamless and it isnāt even clear that would be desirable.
I know thatās not a clear answer to the question, but I hope it helps with understanding.
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