Inrupt

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Inrupt is a startup with the goal of “personal empowerment through data” (similar to the own-your-data IndieWeb principle), and is based on the Solid project, relying on Javascript and RDF.

IndieWeb Examples

• There are no known implementations of a personal site built using Inrupt that utilizes other IndieWeb building blocks.
• A long discussion was held on the compatibility of webmentions and JSON-LD Webmention JSON-LD issue

Other Examples

• John Bruce

Criticism

Inrupt has faced criticism for its winner take all narrative, venture funding model, and non-diverse hiring while advocates ask for diverse volunteer contributors to the Solid open source project that it builds upon.

Unrepresentative of web

Inrupt appeared at launch (2018) to exclusively have male employees: https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the-inrupters/ with a couple of white women contractors from an outside agency; overall an approach that was noted to be unrepresentative of users of the web.

• https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1046253992567861248
  • "Yes, let’s reinvent the web from scratch. We can get it right this time. Step 1, hire only men, with a girl or two for HR & marketing. Step 2, hire as many white ppl as possible, definitely no black folks.
    
    This will end up totally different. Totally better than the first time." @jensimmons September 30, 2018
• https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1046586193075417088
  • "Read a start-up’s team page to see which people are employees, & therefore probaby have equity — and which work for an outside agency, & therefore likely don’t. Pay attention to, say, the gender or race of the people in each group. These are signals of the values of a company." @jensimmons October 1, 2018
• Thread: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1046583798752628736

Update: As of MozFest (October, 2018):

• They appear to have one woman employee. (citation needed)
• https://twitter.com/dietrich/status/1056137052285210624
  • "Tim Berners Lee is speaking at #MozFest this afternoon.
    
    There are serious problems with both the culture and technical approach of his project.
    
    https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1046583798752628736?s=09" @dietrich October 27, 2018

Requested volunteer diversity

In an attempt to respond to criticism about lack of diversity (but apparently not acting in any official capacity for Inrupt (see below "clarifying conversation"), yet listed on website ("Ruben focuses on shaping the Solid ecosystem and its developer experience") amongst employees) an "inrupter", tried to engage in the diversity conversation. This lead to criticism of requesting an underrepresented population to make open source contributions not because of skill with code but to help address the diversity issue.

(screenshotted tweet seems to be deleted, please add internet archive URL)

From the screenshot: A tweet that says “go over to the Solid project, they need some diversity” appears to implicitly ask for unpaid contributions in the context of asking people to go to an open source project (Solid) where the norm and default expectation is unpaid contributions.

(This is the closest I can find.)

@jensimmons Please activate your network to come and join the Solid community. That would help us a lot. As you know, W3C (which is Tim's background) has a very strong view on diversity, and there's no doubt on my mind he is taking the same vision to Solid and Inrupt.

• Clarifying conversation with Ruben Verbogh:
  • From: IndieWeb chat 2019-01-28

    I am not and have never been an Inrupt employee. My correct resume is here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/resume/

• Ruben's resume listed him as an "advocate" for Inrupt rather than an employee.

World Domination Inappropriate In 2018 Global Context

From: https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

In the global socio-political context of 2018 with nationalism (various countries) and fascism (Brazil 2018 election) on the rise, referencing "world domination" (whether jokingly or not) is inappropriate and does a disservice to / is insensitive to the under-privileged populations being actively harmed by worldwide political domination movements.

The criticism also reflected what many felt to be hubris in the Inrupt product roll out. No press release acknowledged a decade or previous work in decentralizing social media that occurred through the W3C, with work around ActivityPub, or with other decentralized data structures like DAT. The media and press wrote a welcome to the inventor of the web, framed as the savior of the next version of the web. This narrative faced backlash among less affluent developers who felt their history was marginalized at best and co-opted at worse.

Many in the decentralized web development community took issue with the idea of trying to rebuild the web using the failed start up model of get venture capital [1], write a post on Medium [2], burn through your capital, get more capital, figure out how you need to monetize user data.

Inrupt was introduced to the world before self-dogfooding personal sites demonstrated actual rather than theoretical use cases.

See Also

• https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web
• https://twitter.com/inrupt_inc
• 2018-10-08 dries: From a world wide web to a personal web / Some thoughts on Inrupt, an Open Source and Open Web startup founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
• 2018-02-21: Bruce Schneier's blog post announcing his involvement: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/inrupt_tim_bern.html