Re: solid.community and solidcommunity.org

Repeating my similar answer from another thread:

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 did not give permission, endorsement,
or consent.  It seems that they took our data, our passwords, our email
addresses, and I suppose our brand, and locked us out, that's about all I
can say

The point here is that users signed up for solid.community, and they did
not sign up for solidcommunity.net.  So importantly there was no consent to
move data, or change data.  Not as a group or on an individual basis

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, I dont know.

I suspect a good solution can be found here.  But as custodian of that
data, here I must emphasise that it's important to us that user data should
not be transferred between one space and another without, that importatn
word, consent

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 20:07, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> 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, 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
>
>