Hello folks,

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TL:DR

• Solid enables a dencentralized, user owned data storage and SSO
• ActivityPods adapts its functionality to the fediverse

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Slowly, things have smoothed out for the fediverse and it has become an everyday thing or even a new home on the internet for many of us. And yet I still don’t feel that I can utilise the full potential of this network.

One of the biggest arguments in favour of the fediverse has always been that you can communicate with all other services regardless of which service you use and that it doesn’t really matter where you register because you still receive all the messages. The reality is often disappointing.

Once registered with a service, you can communicate with all other services, but unfortunately often not in the format for which the other media were created. If you then try to log in to another instance with your account, you will also be disappointed - it simply doesn’t work.

What we are really missing is a SingleSingOn (SSO) solution with which you can log in to any instance and any service. And it already exists! Meet the Solid project.

Solid (Social Linked Data) is a web decentralization project led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The project “aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy” by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users’ control. (Source: Wikipedia, Solid)

In short: Solid stores all your data in a decentralised data store called “pod”. Anyone can host their own pod or use a pod provider. The user can then decide which data is made available to which service and can adjust it centrally at any time without much effort. This is also accompanied by the authentication method through WebID, which is handled via the Solid OIDC protocol.

Solid is designed to revolutionise the entire internet, but specifically for the fediverse there is ActivityPods, which aims to combine the advantages of Solid with the nature of the fediverse. This project will probably be the one that will give us the long-awaited interoperability thanks to SSO. And probably as early as this year!