Attending the 3rd Solid Symposium

I wasn't completely sure if I'd be attending this year's Symposium, given my recent frustrations with NLNet and the subsequent decision to forego the idea of working with Solid full-time.

However! The guys at Muze, who are organizing this year's conference, reached out and have been very supportive. Thanks to their encouragement and support, I'll be there!

What's more, I'm also giving a talk that I'm calling "Solid Unleashed" (as a wink to Wētā Workshop Unleashed :D). It works out perfectly, because it will be a nice way to close this period of working with Solid full-time before going back to side-projects. In the presentation, I'll share some tips to make Solid Apps, and talk about what I hope will be the future of Solid App development. Or at least, my future with Solid as a side-project.

I'm back home from the Symposium, and I'm very glad that I made it this year, because I really enjoyed it :D.

Last year, I mentioned that I was left "drunk with excitement" after the conference, and this year I'm certainly in a similar situation. However, last year's excitement fueled my failed attempt at working on Solid full-time, so I'm tempering my expectations this time around 😅. All in all, I did get some ideas for things to work on, and even though I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to spend, I'm looking forward to exploring them.

In the first day, I attended the Solid Together session, and all the talks were great. Sébastien from ActivityPods shared some lessons learned from building social apps with Solid, which was interesting because it was almost the same idea as my talk! However, we see app development from completely different perspectives, so you'll notice that our tips are very different. But that's part of the point of Solid, depending on your use-case you'll have very different concerns. In any case, I agree with most of the points he made, and even though we're on different parts of the app-development spectrum, I found them very insightful.

Next up, we had a talk from Michel from Solid Couch. Also very focused on Social apps, but he made I point I really enjoyed about distinguishing from "Asocial Networks" focused on content generation and online interactions (Twitter, Youtube, Mastodon, etc.) and "Real Social Networks" focused on human interactions and collaboration (Meetup, Welcome to my place, etc.).

Then, we heard from Philippe from Solid Bench. I wasn't familiar with the project, but I was very impressed by it and I really like it. It's a really good example of where Solid excels, and he even talked about managing groceries in your POD, which is totally my cup of tea!

Finally, Niko from NextGraph, who had also been facilitating the session, talked about his project. I was already familiar with it, but it may have been new for most people in the room. It's a very different approach to data ownership from Solid, but I do like most of their ideals and eventually it should support Solid as well thanks to a collaboration with ActivityPods.

So that was a packed morning!

The rest of the day I spend it talking with people and watching more talks. Something interesting about this conference is that, apparently, it was also about FAIR (which I didn't know before attending). But it was interesting to see what people who isn't familiar with Solid think of the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, my networking was cut short because I didn't get a ticket to attend the conference dinner, and apparently everyone else did. So by 5pm there was nobody else around and I just called it a day. I guess that's what happens when you're on a tight budget 😅.

On the second day, I participated in the Solid Development session. I really enjoyed Maarten's talk about Incremunica, a library to query data across PODs.

Then, I gave my talk, which I think went very well and sparked some ideas both in the audience and myself. I plan on uploading a recording in the coming days, so if you missed it, rest assured, you'll be able to watch it :).

And finally, we had a talk from the team behind jouw.id. I really like their approach to making Solid work for everyone, not just techies, and their balanced approach between Solid purity and practicality. However, they don't allow using their app against self hosted PODs (yet). So I'm looking forward to that before giving it a try.

And that's about it! As I said, I got some ideas that I may be working on, and I still have to upload a recording on my talk. So I'll wait until I do that to close this task. But otherwise, that's a wrap.

I just finished uploading a recording of my talk, you can find it in my Youtube channel (and PeerTube ;D).

I would have done it yesterday, but as you may know, we suffered a massive power outage in Spain 😱. It was gone at 12:30am, and in my case I didn't have it back until 2am. The funny thing is that we still don't know what caused it 😅. Was it a technical failure? a cyber attack? aliens? Who knows. In any case, it's amazing that something like this can even happen. What's more astonishing to me, having great weather conditions in Spain, is that almost nobody has solar panels nor any other way of generating electricity autonomously. So the grid goes down, and we're back to the stone age. Hopefully this will be a wake up call to change that. Once again, we face the issues of centralization.

In any case, that's enough rambling. Now that I'm done with the recording, this task is complete.