I've been thinking about something like Solid for a close to a year now and just now stumbled across the great work that has been done and am delving in.

I wanted to kickoff a discussion about a different aspect of control that the concept of pods give us. Maintainability.

Who here had a Friendster profile? Myspace? AIM? Where is your data now? It's only been recently that we get to transfer data, and contacts when we get a new cell phone and even that is dicey still if you go across providers.

My point is that up until this point in time we haven't had a digital lifetime history. But we should, and pods will give us a digital history that we can maintain, archive, backup, and search ourselves.

That's it. It's just an aspect that I haven't seen touted as a feature, and to me it is a main feature. I want to be able to maintain a backup of my digital identity, and it's impossible when it is spread out through dozens of sites. Similarly, when migrating calendar services, I want to be able to carry my entire history with me, and not just through a janky import/export function.

This has the potential to give us a maintainable identity lifecycle.