Say you could solicit a notable figure in technology, who would you want to lurk on this instance?

varsock@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 21 points –
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Tim Berners-Lee would be interesting I think, given the direction he's gone into personal ownership/control of data.

the idea of service and instance federation is blowing my smooth brain. I wonder if Tim is in awe or to him this would've been the next logical progression

He's pushing for a decentralised web, he's specifically focussed on personally owned data through his Solid project. But it feels like maybe this month or so could be a tipping-point, so it would be great to get his input and/or for him to see how we all work away at it!

to my shame, this is the first time I heard of the Solid project. I've glanced at the page and plan on researching more, but in your opinion what is its practical goal and current impact?

I'm new to it too, I've known about its existence but have been thinking about adding support for it to a project I'm starting soon - really to learn more about it (I tend to learn best by doing!)

It's goal is for each of us to have personal ownership of all our data online, and full control over who can access what. That's certainly something I can get behind! You do this by creating a "pod", which is essentially a database of all your data (I think organised into groups, e.g. each organisation can have their own group of data), which you can self-host if you like, along with the ability to control access.

It's current impact I would say is near zero. But TBL is a person with a reasonable amount of pull, and he's setup his own company providing commercial services (presumably, consulting). My guess is they're dealing with governments and mega-corps - there seems to be very little effort pushing it to "the masses" (i.e. application developers).

The theory sounds interesting but the practicalities of it seem to offer a lot of challenges, so I think the best way to get a real sense of whether it has legs or not is to build something!

@varsock Wait until you find out that I'm reading and replying to this on Mastodon.

@vampatori

:O you're not even lurking from here, but from over there

@varsock yep! Turns out I could just follow @programming and it boosts every post and comment onto my timeline.

Though my instance doesn't support markdown, so I don't get to see any formatting unless I look at the original thread (maybe @Tiwy57 will upgrade us from Mastodon to Glitch-soc someday so we can have that?)

BBSs had fidonet in 1993, if email, usenet and irc don't count