20151210/Solid

On getting off the Facebooks.

I think I found my way off, though it's not quite ready for prime time yet.

https://solid.mit.edu/

I first checked it out a while ago, it's really been taking shape as an amazing way forward.

Initiated by Tim Berners-Lee, the person who created the Web (but failed to immediately move it to the more ambitious Semantic Web), it is a decentralized, knowledge and reusable data system that elevates the Web, so the content we access is strongly typed rather than being whatever any site decides to put together. Its decentralized, peer to peer focus means you can spread your content across the web, including on your own private "pods," with very fine grained access control. It's amazing for personal and shared data curation, and the antithesis of blobs of captive data on sites like Facebook. McLuhan said "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The web had us thinking in rich content pages and links, but then a failure of follow through pushed things back to a 1980s version of communication based on a few big sites, TV style presentations, and coarsely connected systems barely evolved from 1980s dial-up bulletin boards. The evolution the Semantic Web can bring about will be shocking and powerful in detail, as information gathering and curation can become more focused for everyone, more like a fun, easy to use academic's toolkit than blasting blobs of text that only enable filter bubbles, trolling, and gross interpretation by algorithms, that's prevalent today.

Since the Semantic Web was first proposed, there have been a lot of attempts to make this mainstream, but this time the push is social, usable, practical.

I'm amazed at the people that are involved, definitely some of the smartest people from diverse projects in this space.

I'd expect to start using this in the next few months.

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Blikied on Feb 9, 2019