Re: FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 09:50, <christian@darcy.is> wrote:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> first off, I want to thank you for running solid.community for as long as
> you did. That is really appreciated! I also completely understand and
> always promote the notion that personal well-being ALWAYS comes first. All
> my best well-wishes to you.
>
> If you want, I'll happily inquire with Mo from 1984.is to see if he can
> offer help with hosting. (They provide hosting free of charge to darcy.is
> too, for which I cannot praise them enough)
>
>
> There is a question though that I have in the meantime: I noticed that my
> pod from https://jollyorc.solid.community/profile/card#me is now
> available at https://jollyorc.solidcommunity.net/profile/card#me . As you
> said that you have shut down your server, who runs this one, and how did
> they get my data? (the password from solid.community works on the new URL)
>

I guess it is important to point out that the domain solidcommunity.net has
absolutely no relation to my domain solid.community, as the name might
imply.  The owners of solid.community were not asked, did not give
permission, endorsement, or consent.  They moved our data, our passwords,
and I suppose our brand, and locked us out, that's about all I can say.

That's not to say it's bad.  Or that some good can come out of it, such as
users gaining access to their data.

Possibly a good solution would be to have users opt in to moving their
webid, just like you have to click "accept" on cookies, I dont know.

I believe there's a repo here about it:

https://github.com/solid/solidcommunity.net_operations/issues

> I am not mad nor accusing anyone here (and again, I realize that this was
> and is a volunteer effort), but this does also feel a bit like a data
> protection violation, as I heard from the new server only by happenstance
> via a 3rd party.
>
> again, thanks for your past efforts, and hope things get better soon!
> Christian Buggedei
>
> On 10.10.2020 11:27, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> Hi All
>
> After a quarter of a decade the decision was made to shut down the
> community pod.  There were a number of reasons for this, but the most
> urgent of which was due to health issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic
>
> Of all the options available to me, shutting down was the least bad.
>
> It was quite difficult to run as a grassroots project given that we didnt
> have any funding, didnt have our own servers, relied on others for source
> code, and so on.
>
> What started as my experiment to allow users to try out node solid server,
> took on a life of its own.  If you consider that Google Plus with all their
> resources lasted about 2000 days, and we, as a pod, lasted almost 1000,
> that's quite amazing really.
>
> I am sorry that it happened so quickly, I just felt there were limited
> options.  There was a lot of work behind the scenes.  Given the rapid
> escalation of the pandemic, something had to give.
>
> While the data is kept safe and backed up, I appreciate it is disruptive
> to have to change a WebID that you've invested time in. I have had to do
> this myself and I know how painful it can be.
>
> If there was some way for users to reclaim their webid or accounts, and it
> was easy to run.  I'd be open to doing that, perhaps after the peak of
> Covid-19 passes.  It would require a server tho, which we dont have at the
> moment.
>
> I'd like to thank everyone that took part in our journey, especially our
> amazing admins.  All of whom worked skillfully and tirelessly for the
> community, sometimes for years, without ever once being paid.
>
> Keep safe, and hopefully we'll see each other safe and healthy after the
> Covid-19 crisis has peaked
>
> Best
> Melvin
>
>