🍉 max frühschütz – нет войнеFeb 22

are people on here that have opinions about #Solid (the pod technology not the javascript framework / library)

why is it good / not good?

is it usable?

is it in use?

it doesn't seem to have the same popularity as i.e. #ActivityPub / the #Fediverse, even though the concept of solid pods seems to synergize quite well with the idea of a decentralized web, as far as i can tell

Show threadEmelia

There were a few other things (conflicting standards such as ACP vs WAC), but the JSON-LD was repeatedly the thing that developers found hard to wrap their head around. "How do I create a schema?" is a pretty normal question for an application developer, when you're used to working with traditional web app stacks. "Oh, it's JSON" and then they learn, nope, it's not: every property is optional, every property is one value or an array of values. The JSON-LD learning curve is so high that even people I think know it, generally go "yeah, nah, I still don't fully get it"

So to develop an application with JSON-LD you basically need to deal with garbage in hopefully data out. It's not familiar nor simple to 99% of web developers. It's an incredibly niche community of people who actually get it, and they tend to work at companies who really benefit from the properties of JSON-LD.

Feb 23 at 12:34amWeb
Show threadMarcus Rohrmoser 🌻Feb 23
Hi @thisismissem,
yes, IMHO the question is, how big should the mental burden be implementing simple things?
Does AP want to be basic infrastructure, then it should strive to be basic.
I liked the line of thought of @mariusor in a chat with @steve on C2S complexity on C and S sides (keeping servers basic and let lients elaborate). Can't find the post right now.
Show threadEmeliaFeb 23
@[email protected] yeah, for protocols to succeed they need to know when to be complicated and when to get out of developers way. There's some complexity that you can do on the server side, but the client needs to be why you solve that complexity. A server can easily do things like filtering over a dataset. For a client that can be really expensive, since it means retrieving a bunch of data you don't need.
Show threadChristoph BraunMar 15

@thisismissem just stumbled over your comment here.

Why did the developers need to come up with a "schema" in the first place? Proper data modeling is hard (as you say too)

Devs can just define their JSON objects and store them on a Pod, and read them from the Pod in their app. You _can_ simply ignore the LD part here. (My students (try to) do that first when they are already used to web dev)

Doing data modeling for LD (which we should! :)) just gives you more features from the RDF world, no?

Show threadEmeliaMar 15

@[email protected] because you usually need to have some understanding of the data you work with.. database schemas exist because we like structure to things. Dealing with "any" data doesn't really allow you to build an application. It's kinda like how MongoDB's big feature was "no schema! no migrations" and sure enough people who bought into that have realised that this actually meant "all the migrations are in every single code path that you need to access data to interact with it", which ends up being costly in tech debt.

Schema simplifies things by giving you a known shape of data to work with.

Show threadChristoph BraunMar 15

@thisismissem Ah, you are assuming that the dev is also doing the data modeling. Gotcha, makes sense for Indie-Devs or small ventures.

Still, what you describe is not particular to JSON-LD. Devs can simply store their JSON objects in a Pod.

In my experience, the "confused dev" that you described above occurs when the devs are forced to use JSON-LD without understanding the basics of RDF. Proper onboarding is crucial here, tooling like LDO and similar do exist to ease LD development ...