Decentralisation with Solid

Ruben Taelman

Masterclass M2 IMST EISO 2022, 5 May 2022

Video recording

Decentralisation with Solid

Ghent University – imec – IDLab, Belgium

Solid

a Web-based decentralization ecosystem

Solid Logo

1989, CERN Switzerland

Tim Berners-Lee
inventor of the World Wide Web

The Web's foundational ideas

1990-... World-wide adoption

Not just for researchers anymore

1995 - 2017: The Browser Wars

Ended with Chrome's dominance by 2017

Image credit

The "write" part got lost along the way

1999: Web 2.0: Getting back "write"

Social Media

Problems with centralized Web apps

Start of the Solid project

Solid Logo

How Solid works

Personal data pods

Full control of where your pod is stored and who can access it

Solid Pods

Pods can store any kind of data

Personal data, photo's, friends, ...

Solid Pods Storage

Data become decoupled from apps

Centralized App      Solid App

A paradigm shift in app design

Users gain freedom to choose apps

A collection on open standards

Why Solid uses open standards

Solid is an ecosystem

Next steps for Solid

Existing and new standards

Standards are created collaboratively

W3C

Choose your Solid pod implementation

Actively being developed by different parties

Choose your Solid pod location

How to build apps on top of Solid?

Apps need to be able to access multiple pods

A centralised social network app

Data is obtained from a single location

Social App

A decentralised social network app

Data is obtained from multiple locations

Each data element can be stored in a different place (posts, comments, likes, ...)

Social App

How to find data across a massive number of sources?

Open research questions

Solid aims to redecentralise the Web