Designing SAFE/Solid Social Networks

You can also try registering on https://solid.community/register. They’re using the same software AFAIK, so it shouldn’t really matter what provider you register a POD with.

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@happybeing I hear you. Thank you for being candid.

Just wanted to point out that I don’t see you as an adversary. We’re getting to know each other better and I think we’ll get more done this way. I find it relieving to be comfortable enough to have disagreements and talk about it.

Aside One day we'll have to enjoy a walk in the countryside. It's one of my favorite things ever. I've planned trips centered solely around walking. I still want to know what that white amphibian egg sac looking thing was that you found attached to a fence post.

There was dialogue between our internal team and the SOLID team about how to better introduce app developers to working with RDF and associated tools. At the time SOLID was looking for ideas from us on how to proceed because that was also a big question mark for them. The next step was for us to spend a lot of time developing and getting feedback from app developers, so that we could have further dialogue with the SOLID team. I’m not sure if you were aware of these meetings or not.

If not, then a potential part of the plan is that I can become your unofficial (official?) liaison to keep you updated with internal meetings? I’d be happy to do that because I think we collaborate pretty well over in the dev forum.

The next part of the plan is that I can start spending spare time (off the MaidSafe clock), getting more involved. But a big question is what to focus on?
I’ve been under the impression that it’s not useful for myself to learn how to build and work with SOLID servers and their process of authentication since those components are irrelevant to our work with SAFE.

My thoughts are that I’d like to get my hands dirty with RDF, building a somewhat complex data model to get my mind thinking more in graphs. I’ve warmed up to Turtle quite a bit and I want to play around it more. The third thing is that I want to learn SPARQL queries.

I can’t promise anything internally though until we have a meeting to discuss what amount of time we can allocate to his effort.

Is there a different goal that I should be considering? For example, building rapport with the SOLID community by knowing their stack in-and-out?
I think it’s too much to ask to try to convince SOLID people that they are building on a vulnerable stack and to move over to SAFE. They have different goals than us. Let me know your thoughts on that.

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No errors just not sure where to sign in at or how to get things going from there, hooking up with @JPL’s efforts, etc. Registration went smoothly for me.

Might it be an idea to have some kind of working group? I am trying to stay updated as well to everything regarding the connection between SAFE and Solid. I have talked with @happybeing about it. (Other developers might be interested as well like, e.g. @Nigel.)

Most of my time now is spent trying to figure out RDF and the libraries that are produced by the Solid community. I have the same impression about not everything that Solid does being relevant for SAFE developers. If I recall correctly the Alpha 4 milestone will include RDF/Solid, so I hope we’ll figure out how we are going to figure it all out. :wink:

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Thanks Hunter, I’m pleased about that because the last thing I want is to make things difficult or hinder anything, and particularly this! :slight_smile:

Big :+1: for a country walk, or a boat trip maybe :wink:

Re contacts, I’m aware of and was part of some, but what you describe sounds like something I didn’t hear about. It wasn’t reported on the Maidsafe Solid Slack so maybe it predated that. If you are willing to liaise that would be great, but it would save you time if things were just shared on the slack channel. So maybe check why that’s not happening first?

If it you want to spend your own time on this I think its important you spend it on what floats your boat :wink:. And what you described sounds very useful to me, especially as I think we need more Turtle fans to go up against Josh and his evil JSON-LD :laughing: I agree its not vial to know all the details of the Solid server stack (although on second thoughts examining the server code was how I learned what I needed to work with rdflib.js/Turtle and so on). Regarding Solid auth, we might want to create a variation on the Solid auth libraries that will ‘just work’ with SAFE (along the lines of what I did with rdflib.js so that SAFE Plume worked with SAFE - the part I didn’t do, but just hacked, was authorisation).

I also recommend you using the Solid chat to support anything that interests you. No need to have well thought out proposals or ideas or questions. Just ask what you need as and when, and through that mutual awareness and lots of unquantifiable benefits will just happen - which we can call ‘engagement’.

Thanks for receiving my comments so well. I enjoy working with you and find you and everyone else on the Maidsafe team a pleasure to work with, as well as being knowledgable, humble and I think it would be great to have more face to face contact when the chance arises. Although I am a bit of a recluse out on my boat.

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Off late the decentralisation topic is growing in the gitter/solid channel and you have been voicing for SAFE all alone. I think someone from the marketing team can also be of some help here to speak for SAFE when needed (@dugcampbell @SarahPentland ). Your efforts there is much appreciated by everyone at Maidsafe.

From a technical perspective, I see that there is a gap in-terms of keeping our plans laid out in the solid slack channel. And as you pointed out the volume of messages had been low in that channel. Will sort these concerns asap as a team.

I would like to talk on behalf of the frontend team and share the plan/thought process we have ATM. Most of us would know that RDF is the base layer and SOLID sits on top. For us from the network’s perspective, RDF is very important and we will have to figure out the best means to represent in a decentralised internet. For which we have to put some thinking as a unit and bounce ideas between us. D-Web prototype was a starting place for us and after that we had points that we wanted to improve. Nevertheless, we also had good learning from that exercise. Only because of which @joshuef had the proposals for DNS representation in the internal discussions. And now, there is one proposal in the rdflib.js. Also the CAS URL proposal from @bochaco helps RDF representation on SAFE. We as a team believe that we need to contribute to get some engagement and eyes on our project. One of the major concerns is usability of the RDF tools. I don’t think the team struggled to understand RDF, however the team struggled to figure out how to make it usable and still we are struggling for the same.
That is when @bochaco and Paul were voicing and talking about different serialisation and how that might improve usability. The take away was to ponder more about JSON vs other Graph representation. Apart from that we have our immediate milestones too and thus we might seem to be slow in the RDF space. We will have to use the RDF tools more regularly as a team so that we can suggest on improvements or how to fit the same in SAFE. Right now, it is only few who are looking into it. @nbaksalyar @ustulation @ravinderjangra @AshwinKumar @lionel.faber might also jump in sooner, so that we have more people in the office looking at these and getting involved in discussions. We are getting there slowly to engage with the SOLID community by using the tools and trying to help by addressing the problems.

However, as I said we will definitely be vocal in the solid slack channel so that the plan and context is shared.
Thanks as always @happybeing, for all the hard work.

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This is going up on my wall @Krishna and I shan’t hesitate to get it down and wave it at you. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Seriously, thanks for the update. I was aware of all of that activity, just not where those internal discussions are (or the contact with the Solid team around that which Hunter mentioned).

So my point about this was really about how much of this is happening out of sight, how little engagement there has been in public with the Solid team (which left me assuming, incorrectly I see, that there was none after DWeb). And seeing so much going on in the Solid gitter now that Inrupt has launched made me worried that we were missing out on being a part of the ripples that is creating, and also the opportunity to develop shared visions with Solid and their community. Anyway I’m repeating myself, and you have promised :point_up_2: :point_up_2: :point_up_2: :point_up_2: :point_up_2: to work on that which is brilliant. I realise it is a big ask, and also that it won’t be easy, but I’ve said my piece and it has been taken seriously which is all I can really ask. Thanks for that. :slight_smile:

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Good idea. Doesn’t work though. I reached out to Pavittar

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Y’all come on over now, ya hear!
I do recommend summertime, though. Maybe some seal watching if the weather is nice. Possibly moose ribs for dinner if you come in the fall.

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Moose ribs! Moose are bloomin’ enormous, one will do me :wink:

Sounds great. One of the downsides of connecting over such distances though is its hard to take up these offers.

You never know though. :slight_smile:

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Does it mean that RDF triples will be first class objects on the network, maybe even open for querying in SPARQL or similar? Though maybe they would need to be adapted to the strengths and limitations of the massively parallel nature of the Safe Network.

Or, will RDF triples be just listed in text files, accessible to APPs but not queriable in the above sense? Maybe APP devs could implement some sort of indexing on top of MDs but I’m not sure how feasible that is.

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Did you use capital letter in the beginning of your Username? That doesn’t seem to be alowed.

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I got an invalid username when I used capital letters, but it worked fine when I used lower case letters only.

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It’s not immediately obvious is it? They are definitely engineers and not UI designers that’s for sure! Also I found it works better with Chrome than Firefox for some reason. I managed to create some folders and memos etc but struggled with the chat. I’ll have another try over the weekend.

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This did it - thanks

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Thanks for the heads up happybeing, but I can’t find a forum at that inrupt.net link?

I understand your concerns, but if they build a decentralised social network with faults and potential to end up like facebook, surely eventually everyone will move to the one not controlled and hopefully on the Safe Network?

@Sonder they don’t have a forum yet, they are using solid/chat - Gitter

People generally may understand that PODs are much better than Facebook and won’t compare with SAFE Network unless there’s comparable awareness and understanding of both. Trying to ensure that is the reason for my post.

BTW, although this started started about social networks it is now more important for raising the broader issue and encouraging engagement.

I’m really pleased how it has been received and how people here have picked up the baton. I don’t have much time this weekend, but will be back over there when I can, mean time others are getting to grips with Solid which is fantastic.

My thanks to everyone for this :slight_smile:

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There is a link to this
https://www.solidtalk.io/
on this
https://github.com/codyburleson/notes-on-solid
I registered earlier, but nobody was really using it. Now the page seems to be shut down completely.

EDIT: It turns out the above sites are not official. The new official forum is at

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I wasn’t aware of that, thanks @Sascha. I don’t know who has set it up.

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Happybeing This is so EXCITING!!!

Its like the network found its killer app before it even launched. SAFE was awesome to begin with but this is like a “medium is the message” kind of thing. Its like SOLID is the message of the medium known as SAFE. Its like pain doesnt have to entail suffering. But suffering certainly doesnt have to have meaning and when it doesn’t its the worst. But when it does have meaning it is transmuted. I pray this network transmutes the world’s suffering. This is a network of meaning.
A semantic network, like a living thing. If life for so many comes down seeking and search this may start to unlock the power of search in a way that really shows we have’t even scratched the surface.

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