Thread by @AlecMuffett

Re: @timberners_lee's #Solid / @SolidMit

Hi @robertscammell!

More interesting that Facebook, I used to work on TheMine!Project*, a highly influential, much-plagiarised & ultimately unsuccessful stab at personal information stores, from 2006-2011.

*themineproject.org

If you want to know my opinion of how @timberners_lee's #Solid will impact "tech giants", watch this video (actually, x3) from 2010; the bulletpoints are:

- facebook killers, aren't
- there's plenty of room for alternatives
- first it must grow

The media loves zero-sum, david/goliath stories, and thereby often causes doom ("ello") & even tragically suicidal levels of stress ("diaspora*") to people who are foolish enough to pitch themselves/their platforms as the antithesis of "social media giantism; so do please beware.

Frankly: #Solid / @SolidMit will gain or not-gain a userbase upon its own merits, and my experience with @themineproject suggests that it will do so both on its own merits, and without reference to "killing Facebook".

They are two different things. Stop comparing them.

@threadreaderapp unroll please.

ps: if I had to make a bet, the event that would kill #Solid / @SolidMit fastest would be if it gets subsumed by/conflated with the "identity" community; the internet does not actually need yet another identity solution, and attempts to thrust one upon it are generally resisted.

The only folk who demand that the internet "needs" a clean and well-though-out, tidy and well-organised "identity" solution, are folk who are offended that it has gotten this far without one. This goes double for anything mentioning #blockchain.