I made a diagram yesterday that contrasts #ActivityPub and #SolidProject that is I think interesting to consider.
In the past I've been very active on the Solid forum, and tried to get a collab going with #SocialHub community. A number of points that existed then, are still issues today I think.
Like, though anyone could participate in the standards process via chat, the Solid team and Inrupt were not really interested in their community, hardly giving attention while people were building interesting stuff there.
Also at the time basically all available code was Javascript, making Solid uninteresting or hard to access for other language devs.
But I think biggest issue was that Solid didn't know what it was. It was positioned as 'personal data vault' on the landing page then (but not using this term), but was 'secretly' TBL's desire to reboot the #SemanticWeb. The new web would be all 'Solid apps'. But the adoption strategy for that didn't exist.
Here's the diagram btw: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116113963712755122
The problem of #SolidProject knowing what it is, is more an inherited problem of #LinkedData / #SemanticWeb knowing what it is.
Semantic web always was "if only all information on the web were semantic and machine-readable, then...". And there it stopped. Presumably magic would happen.
And perhaps it would. But to make such a big leap, a paradigm shift of the entire web, along the way you have inspire a whole lot of people to set the (r)evolution in motion and keep it going.
If you look at what linked data is, it is a very low-level format. Nice if you have it, but now what are you going to build with it? There are some good application areas, but the case for linked data elsewhere is not a given.
Still today there are regular discussions on 'what would be the killer app for Solid' or linked data in general. Saw some interest for LLM's fed semantic data to make them more deterministic. I'm not interested.
I recreated an old diagram in Excalidraw that I spread about a couple years ago, and made it a bit more informative. Explanation can be found in the #AltText
See also and for discussion: https://discuss.coding.social/t/diagram-interoperability-in-practice/828
Or join the Social experience design chatroom at: https://matrix.to/#/#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org
Also posted to #SocialHub at: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-versus-fediverse-interoperability-in-practice/8498
#SX #SocialCoding #SocialWeb #ActivityPub #SolidProject #fediverse
