What is Solid?

Solid is an open web standard, originated by Tim Berners-Lee (the same person who invented the web itself), for a different way of storing personal data online. It isn’t a company, a product, or a single website you sign up to — it’s a protocol, with several independent, mostly open-source implementations, in roughly the same way “email” is a protocol that Gmail, Outlook, and a hundred smaller providers all implement rather than something one company owns.

The problem it’s aimed at: almost every app you use — Scratch included — stores your data on its own servers, in its own account system, under its own rules. If you stop using the app, or the organisation running it shuts down, changes its terms, or gets bought, your data usually stays locked inside it. Solid’s proposal is to separate the app from the storage: instead of every app holding its own private copy of your data, you keep your data in a personal online datastore called a Pod — short for “Personal Online Datastore.”

Think of a Pod as a locker that belongs to you: you choose which apps get a key to which parts of it and you can move the locker itself to a different provider (or run your own) without losing access to what’s inside or having to ask every app to migrate with you.

Two things about Solid matter most for this project:

1. Decouples data storage from application implementation. Because Solid is an open protocol rather than one vendor’s product, a Pod isn’t tied to any one organisation’s continued existence or goodwill. See How this differs from previous attempts.

2. Fine-grained, revocable permission, not an all-or-nothing switch. A Pod owner can grant a specific person or app access to one specific piece of data and take that access away again later — instead of a single “shared” or “not shared” toggle that applies to everything or nothing.