( Solid ) The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet - timbl

Wow, 15 years is really a long time, looks something really huge as you said.

Sleep deprived here, reading the site, lots of words but not understanding exactly what this is all about. Will have to read again when I'm awake.

First web browser I used was lynx, also for browsing gopher and ftp and nntp. Back in the days before GUI. I was running DOS back then, multitasking with DESQview... Dial up to an shell account on a Unix machine with internet connectivity and lynx was my primary tool for exploring what was available out there... I think university of Minnesota had a great directory of gopher sites back then. Also remember some early e-commerce stores which were accessed by telnet. Basically a BBS on the internet.

At some point, a friend told me about a way to get online using windows 3.1 and some awkward SLIP connection script in Trumpet Winsock or whatever it was called. With Windows I could be on the internet and running more than one program at the same time! News, mail and web at the same time. And there was this new web browser that had colors and could load pictures. It seemed kind of extra, unnecessary. Who needs pictures on a web page? It just makes everything slower. Web pages in lynx were pretty much instant. Then came Netscape and the browser kept evolving with fonts and wallpapers and blinking text and so on. Web kept getting slower and slower, but more interesting, more personality. :)

The pre-commercial WWW was a magical place to me...

Netscape back in those days had a WYSIWYG editor built in. I even got paid for making a site using it once when I was younger. They dropped that editor when Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came around, though.

First observation.. it doesn't work with older versions of Firefox i.e. 41 but it's fine with 51, hmm..
Need more study.. Concept unclear..
PS. FTPmail (Archie) for president..

So after a poor night of sleep and reading the specs... It seems like a URL-based authentication scheme, like the push to use OpenID 15+ years ago (rather than "login with Facebook" you'll login with a URL of your own identity in your own server, or on someone else's server, if you've created an identity and a certificate pair). And then a sort of decentralized "social data" layer tied to that, less structured than something like Diaspora I guess. Where your "friends list" and personal data, photos, status updates, shared documents, whatever, are not part of any particular website or platform, but available to any website or application that has authenticated with your solid account. So pretending current social networks implemented solid, Facebook or Google+ or Instagram would not hold your personal data on their servers, they'd just be a presentation layer for the data that already was created by you in your solid pod. So your friends or followers could view the content you've created using whatever software platform they prefer.

At least that's how I'm reading it which sounds like the barrier for entry is way too technical for most people (is grandma going to understand public key cryptography, expiring certificates, web servers?) plus requires buy-in from other apps or web platforms to somehow stop hoarding user data, which for most of them is the whole reason why they exist.

So I'll say "good luck with that, sir tim" :P

Looks to me like a whole warehouse of cans of worms waiting to be opened.