solid.community and solidcommunity.org

For those who are just catching up on the situation with solid.community and now solidcommunity.net, you can find most of the relevant information in my comment here: https://gitlab.com/solid.community/proposals/-/issues/16#note_426455085 <https://gitlab.com/solid.community/proposals/-/issues/16#note_426455085>
To summarize, the Solid community pod service is still running strong — data has not changed hands or switched providers. We’ve just had to switch domains because Melvin unilaterally chose to take the solid.community domain offline. The change will of course break all links to things on the server, and mean all its users have to switch their WebIDs, but the accounts are all preserved, through the efforts of Justin and Jackson from the Solid Project’s ‘admin’ team <https://github.com/solid/process/blob/master/administrators.md> - who have in fact had been maintaining the server and cloud environment with updates and bug fixes for a while. They made automated tools to make the transition as seamless as possible, and community members like Alain and others have already contributed more.

They had to act fast because the solid.community service had been providing a lot of value. More than 50,000 accounts had been created over the years!  It was being used, for example, as a team space for the open source solidos project. The Solid Roadmap task tracker was there as well. Who knows how many other experiments and tests and projects?  I imagine many people joined on the assumption, from the domain name if nothing else, that it was a server run for the benefit of the community.  

In order to help prevent situations like this from happening in the future, the Solid community Pod service — including the new domain name, solidcommunity.net, and the servers behind it — are now properly administered by the Solid Admins in accordance with the Solid governance process <https://github.com/solid/process#administration>.  

As to the (relatively modest) running costs, the server has been funded since 2014 from the old Solid project at MIT.  That funding continues. 

The server, now at https://solidcommunity.net <https://solidcommunity.net/>, has along with inrupt.net been one of the two main pod services which people typically pick when they want to look at solid.  This has been while the number and seriousness of apps and operating system frameworks they can use with it has been increasing. There are several other pod providers in fact, and many more expected, run by companies, government agencies, non-profits and individuals, with different expectations.  So the overall resilience of the solid ecosystem is in general increasing.

Tim