WebID

A WebID is a way of proving who you are on the web using a URL instead of a username and password. It's a web address, something like https://alice.example/profile#me: that, when you fetch it, returns a document describing you: your name, your Pod's location, which cryptographic keys or certificates belong to you. Solid uses WebID as its core identity mechanism: your WebID is how a Pod or an app recognizes you, and historically it was paired with a TLS client certificate (a method called WebID-TLS), so proving your identity meant proving you held the private key matching the certificate listed in your WebID document.

WebID came out of W3C Semantic Web and FOAF ("Friend of a Friend") community work in the early 2010s, well before Solid existed as a project, and Solid adopted it as the natural identity layer for a system already built on Linked Data.

Where Solidus stands

Solidus does not use WebID, anywhere, on purpose. Where Solid identifies you with an HTTP address backed by a TLS certificate, Solidus identifies you with a did:solidus: a W3C DID method registered in the W3C DID Method Registry, anchored on our chain, with revocation enforced as a consensus rule rather than left to certificate expiry or a document edit. This is the one genuine architectural divergence between Solid and Solidus worth naming plainly: it's a bet that a chain-anchored DID handles identity and revocation better than an HTTP-plus-certificate identifier does. It is a bet. Solid's WebID approach has real, multi-year institutional deployments behind it (BBC, NHS, Flanders); did:solidus has a testnet.

Proof

There's no Solidus-run proof here, because we don't implement WebID, saying otherwise would be dishonest. To see a real WebID, dereference the profile URL of any public Solid pod (an Inrupt-hosted pod works); you'll get back an RDF document, typically in Turtle, describing that person.