index.md 2.1KB
title: Hack-first lang: en
About Solid itself, I think it is a spec-first approach. They took 15 years to write the spec, and now they’re saying the community can begin building the apps. The approach in Scuttlebutt is the hacker way, it’s a hack-first approach. It began in Node.js, and many of its modules were proof of concepts that had to evolve to become more production-ready, and only now that it’s validated, we are spec’ing it on paper. It has worked well to make things happen, and see if people are actually going to use it. I would prefer the hack-first spec-later approach, while Solid is doing the opposite. It could work either way.
That said, 15 years in spec is a very long time, the world back then barely had social networks and mobile phones were Nokia phones. People were giggling about the prospect of 1 megapixel cameras on their phones. If you look at the seminal article from 2003 that inspired Solid, they mention the the read-write web. In my opinion, the read-write web is already perfectly embodied in the Beaker Browser. And Beaker is working software, with a self-growing community.
But Solid is very different to Beaker. It’s centered around this pods concept that you install on some server to you hold your data. What about easily writing on the web? How does Solid answer that? The answer seems to be through apps that access my pod data, but it’s not justified why is that a good idea to begin with. And the approach to identity is in my opinion outdated. Nowadays with cryptocurrencies and p2p protocols (like Dat or IPFS or Scuttlebutt), identity is a cryptographic keypair, yet that’s not the case in Solid
I did not see anybody in my bubble enthusiast about the Solid project. Which might be a good thing (remember that “vague but interesting” comment) but still, I wonder how that approach can take off without early adopters. We’ll see.
Note: remember that you can Ask Me Anything by email. It might take time but I eventually answer.