A Decentralised Web3 possible without Blockchain

The web is not what it was supposed to be.

At least that is the opinion of Tim Berners-Lee (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to be exact, and also Professor Tim Berners-Lee since he is faculty at both Oxford and MIT).

Why does his opinion matter? Because he invented the web. And you can’t help like him when you hear him speak. Epic words from TBL.

“We did talk about it*as Web 3.0 at one point, because Web 2.0 was a term used for the dysfunction of what happens with user-generated content on the large platforms,” he said.

“People have called that Web 2.0, so if you want to call this Web 3.0, then okay.”

*’It’, means Solid, TBL’s decentralization project, minus blockchain.

The director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is credited with developing hypertext back in the 1980s. While at CERN, he created the first web page in 1991. TBL, as he is known among peers, was behind the development of HTML, URL structure, and the HTTP standard.

The man is to web what the Wright Brothers were to flying.

Now, after several decades, he has a new idea he calls Solid (Socially Linked Data)*. Solid promises to revolutionize the way the industry goes about realizing what it calls Web 3.0.

*I call it ‘new’ loosely; the project has been live since 2017.

Why Solid for Web 3.0?

To understand the technology, you have first to understand why TBL thinks Solid is necessary.

Think back to 1996. The web was very different. Websites such as BBC Online and AOL offered information. We read it using browsers.

Some of us offered information too through a personal web page (remember Yahoo! GeoCities). But there were no algorithms around that used it to analyze us.

The web landscape changed with the coming of social media. The web did not become decentralized as TBL had originally hoped.

Mega corporations have emerged that harvest the information we share freely.

Brace for it: Data is the new oil. The cliche of our times, but true — like many cliches.

Big Oil — ExxonMobil, BP, Gazprom, PetroChina, Chevron, and Shell, were replaced by Big Tech — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.

They offer everything for free: social media platform, video sharing, email, chat, video calls, messenger, easy-to-use FTP, payments system, and e-commerce. In return, they access our personal information including but not limited to location, age, gender, address, bio-data, life events, shopping habits, health records, and much more.

There are no limits to what they can do with that data.

Just in case you’ve forgotten how serious this is, a reminder: Facebook helped Cambridge Analytica collect data on 700,000 users without their knowledge, who further used it to help political candidates like Trump.

So what is Solid and why should anyone care?

It is a project to re-decentralize the web.

The project aims at developing a tech stack that would make the privatization of data possible and seamless.

Legislations like GDPR let you download your own data, but do not let you remove it from the server. In other words, your data is not private and you do not know what is done with it.

For example, if you delete your Facebook account, the data you generated would be removed from public consumption, but the data would remain in their servers.

The alternative, according to Solid, is to develop Pods (Personal Online Data Stores).

What are Pods?

You can think of Pods as a tiny server that belongs to you.

Any information you wish to share would be a part of the Pod.

That could be anything from your blood test report to your playlist.

Only you have access to the data and control the information flow. You could choose to share it with one, or multiple apps.

There is no need to upload your address separately to Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. These apps could ask your Pod for the information.

The same for images, media, health records, and so on.

If all of it was part of a single database, it would be more efficient and, most of all, private.

Do I buy a Pod?

You can self-host a pod. Solid is open source and anyone with sufficient coding skills can set up their own Pod.

Otherwise, you can rent one from a Pod provider much in the same way as we purchase hosted websites.

Every user would have a WebID that would identify them as the owner of a Pod and the data inside it. A WebID is very similar to using Google or Facebook login credentials across various sites.

What are the challenges?

There are two principal challenges:

1. Ontological Difficulty

For the sake of the uninitiated (in philosophy and computer science) ontology means “what exists”.

Q. What exists (in front of you?)

A. A table

The first is for different apps to agree on a common means to communicate with the Pod.

Apart from HTTP — an information exchange protocol defined in the early 90s — the web has been developed independently by different enterprises.

Such as YouTube and Facebook, both store audio-visual media, but in very different ways. The tech stacks they use are not the same.

If you upload a video of your trip to Bali on YouTube, there is no ready way to display it on Facebook (except for an API, like the one which lets WhatsApp playback YouTube inside the chat window).

How does YouTube tell the Pod that I liked a podcast by Joe Rogan and how does the Pod communicate the same to say Spotify? How does YouTube tell Spotify what exists, without telling Spotify what I liked?

In other words, ontological complexity in communication between apps and between apps and the Pod.

It is easy to share the same pathological report with three different doctors and hospitals.

But when it comes to the massive amounts of data, we generate daily. How to tell apps what we have and what we would like to share.

Unless Google knows you are at a place, how can it suggest a museum nearby? Same with online shopping and discount offers and so on.

2. Free or Freedom

If these services cannot harvest our information, they would then charge for their services.

Many of these services have become ubiquitous, such as using online maps, web-based email, chat software, and video calls.

The use of Pods means an entire industry that has been assembled in a particular way over 25 years has to now completely re-imagine itself.

If Google has no access to our data, then YouTube and Gmail will not be free.

If Amazon has no access to our shopping habits, then 1–2 day delivery would cost far more.

We do not pay, because we are offering information in exchange.

Most of all, no one knows how this will play with other technology in the pipeline, including IoT and AI.

Will it succeed?

That is rather hard to say, but I really wish it does.

Solid has no answer to an essential question — what if data is copied by an app? What if a cab-bookings app stores the data by copying it?

The subreddit for Solid is rather muted about future prospects.

Even the official MIT page and About Page at the Solid Project are quite silent apart from promising data privacy.