I don’t see how you can prevent others from collecting your data without laws and enforcement, which seem to be hard to pass and maintain (see: GDPR and right to be forgotten. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they don’t, and they have their own issues).

The technology is already here for people to collect and publish their own data. Most people in the US can purchase their own VPS, host their own website, use federated media and self-hosted services. Lots of sites and institutions let you request your data, though sometimes the process is obscure, and you can scrape any data about you that is visible to you. The main obstacle here is that it seems the vast majority of people aren’t interested, I wouldn’t expect a layman to even know what “self-hosted” means.

It only works when the majority of good actors adopt it as a standard. Effectively an agreement to abide by it. Or, as the article notes, it's enforced as a part of policy. In Europe it's being pitched as a method to help assure GDPR compliance. Of course that likely falls apart if what would be good actors don't agree to utilize or adhere to the standard. It probably needs to be picked up as a W3C standard or something to see broad use.

i use it, it is compatible with www.

www runs on servers and is available over http

solid runs on servers and is available over http

the best metaphor is, you know when you log into another application using facebook? that’s all over http, or www (not a real protocol, but a paradigm for indicating http compatibility of a server)

solid is exactly like that, but not everyone is there yet, so it feels broken, when really it is just lonely.

It’s good to develop standards even if the vast majority of people won’t adopt them, so the small minority who care build on one good protocol instead of many bad ones.

Ex: ActivityPub. You have many different people making social networks, and they all can interact with each other. These “many people” are a tiny fraction of those who use HTTP, but their numbers are enough to form many thriving communities.

At the same time, ActivityPub and its services (Mastodon, Lemmy) have serious flaws in discoverability, permanence, and inefficiency. If someone were to invent a new protocol (perhaps AT, perhaps “ActivityPub 2.0” or “ActivityPub+”, perhaps something else) with a way to interop with and migrate old data, it could be very beneficial to those communities.

Furthermore, one day the world may change enough for a new standard to take hold. And perhaps it will be sudden, and/or developing a “good standard” takes a long time, so we wouldn’t have had time to if we didn’t start on a random day like today.