When we built solid, it was…

When we built solid, it was a way to extend the existing web with more features. Basically the web is not a finished project and Tim Berners-Lee always had in mind more things, more decentralization. It's just hard to build and takes time, especially at scale. Also very people supported Tim. For a long time it was just Tim, me and Eric doing daily calls to keep the original Web project going.

We added pub/sub to http via an http header. So every resource could have its own pub/sub. In that way something like nostr was destined to become part of the web. It still can be. We always wanted signatures but didnt find a good way. Some things were too general, some things were too specific, and people argued over that for decades. Fiatjaf just came along and made something that worked.

Nosdav is putting that back together and bringing nostr into the web stack. Solid is going to a WG and in 2-3 years will be a W3C REC, I hope it will all converge.

E2EE is something different. Simplex is more like a relay model but dont forget it's a company with VCs such as villageglobal and that provides a single point of failure. The protocol will catch on if it's simple, right now it's a company doing some good open source work. Dont forget that e2ee might get banned in the UK and signal may leave.

If your only use case is e2ee you might want to build something new, but there's a lot of solutions in that space, and the best technical answer doesnt always win.

You could build some e2ee solution and let nostr users log in. Let's face it, nostr is right now the only social solution where the users own the network, isnt it?