An impossible journey into self-hosting
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At criminal, we've made IT a tradition every december to dedicate an episode entirely to animals who are really going .

for a for about police. H hi, i'm from the came up.

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Welcome to the verge cast, the flagship podcast of network tached storage. I'm my friend David piers, and this is the fourth in our four part series, all about connectivity. Or last few weeks, we've dogging into the ways we connect to content, to each other and to audiences.

And this week, I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about software, how software connects us, how we connect to software and how software connects to other software. And that story, at least for our purposes today, starts with the computer I bought a little while ago.

I bought on any amazon with essentially new research, but I it's called the b link mini PC. IT has twelve generation intel chips, sixteen giggs of RAM, five hundred or gigs of us. Storage to find little computer.

And it's just this little box of a thing about the size of, like two of the boxes the iphone comes in. It's pretty small. And I just hit IT immediately off in the corner of my desk. I bought this thing because I wanted to test a theory. That theory is that maybe self hosting is the future of technology.

Over the last two decades, really, we've been on this race toward cloud software in which all of the apps and platforms and data you use are stored not on your computer, but on a server somewhere in a google or amazon or microsoft are house. There are a lot of good reasons for that shift. There are lot of good things about cloud's software, and there are also a lot of reasons to think cloud software is not going anywhere anytime soon. Here is Peter vane harden burg, who works at a research lab called icon switch, explaining the upsides. I think pretty well.

the idea of the cloud was that, hey, IT turns out that actually shipping softer on the people's computers as a huge pain in the neck is at a date you can fix IT. If IT breaks, you have no idea what's happening. There's all these problems.

And I think the biggest thing just from like a like a breath test tax perspective is not a technical problem. IT was like a an on wording problem. Clubs software gets user easier. We're going to .

come back to Peter in a minute, I press. But cloud is software for all the things that makes easier and more useful, also has lots of downsides. IT doesn't work off line for one thing because it's not really on your device at all.

Also, if that software developer goes away or pivots to something else or just decides not to deal with you anymore, the software you rely on can just disappear. The cloud software world is convenient and great, but it's just fragile and IT is so fundamental, not yours. So like I said, I had this theory that self hosting might be the answer, at least for important stuff.

I figured maybe I should stop relying on cloud services and instead build a system that lets me access my own stuff from anywhere through tools that eye control. So I bought this bink and started setting stuff up. IT went poorly.

The main thing I discovered is that self hosting is hard and not the world's most technically capable person. But I know my way around a computer, and still I could bitterly get things up and running. If you wanna set up a plex server so you can get IT your movie collection from anywhere, that's pretty easy.

But at least in my experience so far, there is essentially nothing else out there that is that easy. One great guide I found is from an authoring entrepreneur named direct servers who created a really handy step by step system for registering a domain, setting up your own cloud shortage and routing everything from files to email to your calendar, all to that system. He calls this guy tech independence, which I really like.

And IT is really useful. You can get through IT without knowing a tome going in, but IT is so much work and IT requires a lot of technical sophistication just in the sense of you have to know what terminal is and how to open IT and what to type in and just time and energy. It's just a luck I won't let you I built about halfway through the process.

I ran into a thing with the F, T, P. Server and just gave up one will. I did manage to set up is called image, is a self hosted alternative to google photos.

I was thinking about IT at the beginning of this process and realized that if all my cloud stuff worked to disappear tomorrow, the photos I lost to be the worst part. So I wanted switch them over to something that wouldn't go away. And image is actually a great tool.

IT has a nice mobile APP that has lots of features. It's a pretty possible google photos replacement. But by the time I downloaded docker and was wearing about virtual machines and containers, IT was eating all the memory on my computer.

I was just back to feeling totally over my head. I did eventually get IT working. But I can't imagine most people are gonna want to do all of that work.

Image was created by this kind named alex trend. And I kept wondering how he felt about the set up process. So I called him up and ask. He told me that he started working on image in the first place because wife wanted to to like google photos, but didn't want to pay for google photos, which, as far i'm concerned, is like an extremely universal opinion on the internet. So he set out to build something that was self hosted and easy, and he found nothing.

So when I first started image, I use the image as the a opportunity for me to learn about, you know, how to build nice software, how to build good, soft, often are. So I structured IT in a way of using docker. Using docker is actually coming from the idea from the community on the self hosted suspected that everything should be running from docker because of the ease of development and minutes at the time.

I didn't have a lot of experience with dockers. So nice is perfect for for me to learn how to be a docket image, how to put that into a deployable way. So I put everything into docker compose.

And at first they were a bunch of setting that you have to do before, are running the doctor, compose up, come comment to bring up the whole application. And over time, that has been simplified. And now we basically move all of the and anything that you can configure through the comment, through the a environment variable. Now you can do IT directly inside image. So is cut out that initial configure to the point now that the only thing that you need to change when you setting up a new in server is location where you want to sort of file and then you just the docker compose up and then .

they would run, yeah, I found the, the, the install package on your website even, which was surprisingly simple. I was I was impressed with how quickly I got up and running.

Yes, has gone through a lot of improvement. And for sure, this is coming from the team that has with a lot of deployment. So i'm really thankful for, for them to help me learn .

yeah that some what do you think just the fact that IT requires docker kind of immediately rules out most people? Lake, I don't think i'm gna convince my wife to like even know what docker is in order to set up a photos server. A rate. Is that just kind of the the cost of doing software this way? That is there is there a world in which all of this can be made simper and easier over time and start to feel like, you know, you can install and set up a server just like installing and setting .

up another APP. There are a lot of request. But from my point of view, when when you are doing something, especially for self hosting, right? And now when IT come to your really important data, like photo, the person who managed the server should have some technical knowledge about managing the server.

I think this is a something that a self hosting person should learn is to how to use docker. Because now when you go into the the awesome self hosted get up report, most of the application you see can be run from docker because it's just make the development easier, more mainstream and also the deployment easier and more mainstream. For example, you can deploy on debi an ubuntu orpha the same way without worry about which package should be compatible with my this version. Every everything is just just work from the containment zone standpoint.

What's your sense of kind of the state of the self hosting movement in general? Now the year in IT, now you've been talking to people I feel like there's been this little crowd of people who really believe in self hosting, and they're mostly very technical and they understand how to make this work and they know all of the different sort of underlying systems and they spend a lot of time in terminal. I don't feel like the self hosting role has ever quick gotten out of that, but part of me thinks that might be starting to happen, being able to kind of have your stuff on your device, but access IT from anywhere is starting to be a slightly more mainstream thing. What are using, do you think, like self hosting about IT hit the big time.

The recent sentiment is that a lot more people are starting to concern more about their privacy with all the story that about the third party or the services that you use can access your data. So more and more people starting to be noticing that. And I I think the more people stand out to think that, then they will start to find a way to get back that of the data.

And IT would be a good drive to get people to look into self hosting more. But of course, this is a very technical field, right? You would need to have some I T knowledge, some computer knowledge, as well as networking a sea.

So that's why is not that easy for other people to get into, but someone to really be interested in this. So I still feel like some maybe a long way to to go in order to get more and more people to get into self hosting. But with the trend of you know high paying C S degree, high paying C S jobs, so more people get into computer science. So it's exposed the more to these things yeah.

it's going to be interesting to see if the trend is that more people gain these skills or if that these tools and systems become simpler. And it'll probably be a little of both, right? Like do you think there is a path for, you know, the people who just don't have the interest or expertise to care about docker to maybe in a few years be able to make use of a tool like this that teams like what we're kind of one really great user interface invention away from this stuff being easier to think there's a way to get there?

Yeah, we always looking for a way to make IT simpler, but as a fine. Now I think with the limitation of the tool that we have in the tool that we have access to in order to serve to fulfill the purpose of high performance, easy to maintain, right now, I don't see a tool Better than docker unless we have some invention, doubt road in this space that compete with docker to make things even more streamline and easier.

That would be really cool thing to have. But as up right now, I don't see the old alternative. If you do know anything, please let me know.

By the time I finish talking to alex, i'd sort of given up on the idea that self hosting can be a mainstream solution for people who want more ownership and control of their stuff. Seriously IT just the fact that docker and APP, that's all about container zed application development might become a mainstream thing that people know how to use just seems wrong to me. I just don't think that's gonna happen.

I don't think it's necessarily impossible to make self hosted systems that are user friendly and simple. I think plex is actually a really good example of how to do IT, right? But there's just not much else out there that qualifies right now.

But as I was asking around trying to figure out what might work if self hosting doesn't, I heard about this concept that a few people mentioned to me. It's called local first software. And when we come back from a quick break, we're going to talk about why local first software might just be the best of both world.

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right. Well back, okay, local for software. Let's go back forty years or so to the early days of the computer area.

Computers were two and boxes and asian made by a bunch of companies that mostly don't exist anymore. Back then, cloud services weren't a thing. Nobody was running all the software on servers anywhere because none of that existed.

People acquired software by, like going to a store and buying a box that had a disk of some kind in IT that you plugged into your computer to install a program that all sounds sort of queen. Now like, can you imagine getting in the car and driving to target every time you wanted to get a new APP on your phone? Hard pass.

It's all much Better now. But that approach did have one really nice side effect. Your software was yours. IT was installed on your computer locally. If the company that major game went out of business, you might not get updates, but your game would still run fine on your computer if the developer of your productivity and made some horrible U I change you hate, no problem, just don't buy the next version. That how software work for a long, long time.

One way to think about IT is that our computers used to be the home for our software, and now they're just the way that we access software that lives somewhere else. The different feels small, but IT actually totally changes the way we think about what our devices actually do, which brings back to Peter from before. Remember red, the cloud services guy from incan switch.

He is a big believer and promoter of the idea of local first software, which he thinks can combine the best of all of the last decades of software, basically in a local first world. Your apps live on your device, just like they did forty years ago. They are yours.

Your software belongs to you, and you can access them offline or without worrying that they'll still be around tomorrow. But you can also connect that software to the cloud and get all of the collaboration and multiple vice sink and in general, the convenience benefits of having in in the cloud. This sounds like the best of both world, right? This is how I should all work, I think so.

I call IT Peter to ask him how IT works, why he's such a big believer in the idea and why software didn't turn out that way in the first place. He started by telling me a story about a music APP that I certainly had not thought about in the long time. And I bet you have an neither.

It's called r dio. r. Dio was a great piece software, but the offline mode for the R D O. APP was like a whole other program from the main APP. IT had different features having different ways at a different bugs.

And I just remember this feeling of like, why was the song I just listen to and the players that was just looking at where did they go when I went in the offline mode because I had them here. And so in a sense, what was happening is that this APP was deleting my data, right? And like there's a more soph stic.

I am a developed, these are my friends who built this APP approved on this stuff. I know the real answer is more complicated, which is that, like, know the kind of Normal way of building apps in this era is that you have a server, which is where the software really lips and the thing that you hold on your in your hand or the thing that you have on your computer in front of you. That's not really the program.

That's just like a mask in front of the program. And IT talks to the program on your behalf and IT presents like a pretend version of the program. That's what you use.

And I had this feeling of like especially though if you have an offline mode, then you need to have the program because you can't talk to the program when there's no internet. But it's crazy because everybody y's building like the sophisticated program they are running in, in the cloud. And then on the mobile APP in the device for offline node the'd run smaller, worse versions of IT that don't actually work the same way.

And I was just like, how about this? How about we write the program? We run ted on our computers, and then we talked to the cloud to get the data.

And then we have the data in our computers, whether they're in our pockets or on our laptops or whatever, is like when you go in an airplane or in a taxi or take muni and your computer just turns into a paper weight that sucks. And not only that, but like, I was a huge fan of ro, I know a lot of people who loved idea. You can use that anymore.

You can't use that anymore because you never had that. I can still run win amp. I can go in download win nap, and I can run win up.

Today, I can find all those sweet skin from one thousand and nineties. I can use win up. The artist is gone forever.

And as I got deeper into the stuff, the more I started to think about that and the more I realize that, like, not only is this just an inconvenience for me, it's it's a disappointment, right? Like rip google reader or whatever your favorite cloud software that's gone, but like we are in a dark age of software. And I mean that not unlike the sense of the soft, is bad.

What I mean is that every piece of software that runs today, that built the way we built software, everything we built on heroic, where we used work, all that stuff is going to disappear irrevocably soon. And everything that we've built, and everything that we've done in this era, all of our collective communal work will be lost. The thing you're .

describing the where IT sort of matches the best of those two things, the city of local first software. How do we not get to that sooner? That that seems like anyone sort of looking at this for a long time should have thought, what if I had the APP on my device like r dio, such as interesting exam ready to people at r dio.

Did they just not think someday this will all be gone? Wouldn't you be nice like this is what the things I go back and forth, all of this oft er is I understand all the reasons is easier to build cloud first software and that it's more you make more money doing and that will make sense. But but part of me wonder like is the reason just that people don't care about the flip side?

I don't think that's IT. I think there are a few elements here, but a lot of IT comes these two things as a technical chAllenge. And there's a narrative dimension OK.

The narrative dimension is that, you know, everybody wants to build the next big start up and make a billion dollars. Venture capitalists are telling everybody that had to build software, everybody thinks today have to build for google scale. They're na need khanda that gona have a billion users that gonna.

You know, if this ends a rocket ship, just hop on. And like when you approach building softer with this mindset, then you reach for the tools that other people who have done this task have used, sed. And so a big part of IT as well as that, like, you know, there's like the term is pass dependence, right? Like we started making cloud soft.

Oh, this is great. And then we just kept piling more and more energy onto that, trying to solve the problems of IT. And there was very little investment on this other access.

You know, there was like the offline first movement, which I think there is a closely related precursor. But like the narrative has been, like, what why do you want that? The cloud solves all our problems, right?

Like internet is everywhere. You have got wifi at home. You've got wifi.

You make a hot spot with phone. And everyone said internet all the time. What's the big deal? Just wait.

It'll be there. And so first, that's not true. I mean, there is internet more and more places.

But the other thing is this kind of like the consequences of the cloud took a long time to become clear, right when we started working on heroic u know. And back in the day, there wasn't killed by google dot com, right? We didn't have a history of apps that had come and gone.

And I were lost because we hadn't had time to go through that sort of generational cycle. So I think a lot of the problems have no as so often is the case of emerged over time, right? If you look at the oil, nobody was like, hey, this awesome energy source might turn out to have some consequences someday. People like this is amazing. I go see my ads and I don't have to, like, feed the horse to get there.

That's very and IT does seem like you know you mention the narrative side and the technological side and IT does seem like with sort of the, I don't know, manifesto of local for software. You did try to get IT both of those because I think one of the questions I came into this with was like to what extent is the kind of heady case for data ownership and launch eva and the idea of like having a space on the internet, that's mine.

How far does that really get you? And I feel like you do make some of that case and course, how broadly effective you think that case can be. But then there is also like at some point, you just have to build Better products. And I feel like one thing i'd liked about the way you guys to approach this is you also make the case that this is a way to make Better products.

Yeah, I think these kinds of philosophical perspectives will motivate a certain audience. But I think that when you make the right thing, the easy thing, people will do IT. It's as simple as that if it's cheaper and easier to build software local first, then people will do IT.

And so what we do is we just focus on that problem, which is, you know, we care about some of these things and we know there are people who care about some of these things and that's great and they're like people with privacy concerns, like activists and so on. But like I think when you look at those narrow and eh markets audiences, the great people with real problems, and it's great to be able to help people who have those problems. But like we all want software that works.

We all hate when the thing doesn't go, when the key strokes are too slow and you hit submitted and you get a spinner like and we can just make IT easier to build software in a way where that just doesn't happen or happens less, then I think everybody will be happy. So just make the right thing. The easy thing you are saying oh, earlier, like is IT harder to build software this way.

It's impossible to build software the way we build software. It's costs of fortune to. Build software. The way we build software, you need to learn couper nets, those like literally like two hundred three letter acronym services that constitute amazon web services.

And then on top of that, you have to learn go multi cloud and learn how to do IT on google and microsoft as well. It's impossible to build software today. The way we build software, it's like you want to like go to the grocery store and you've got to use all the technology to build an aircraft Carrier to get there.

What we need is bicycles, right? But all we're building an aircraft Carriers. And this is like the JoNathan Edward's line, right? We were promised bicycles for the mind, but we ve got aircraft Carriers instead. It's so complicated to build anything in the cloud. And then on top of that, once you do, you figure out your graphical well and whether you postgrads or mongo, and like what front end framework can know or go on the back end.

And do you need use off zero? Do you need use this? You like all these cloud services you put in all together, you get the damn thing running and then you got to pay every months to keep the thing online. And when anything falls over, you get page in the middle night woke up, it's impossible to build software. And if you do, you're gone to regret IT because you're going to cost you a fortune.

wake you up yeah and most of the pieces of that equation you have absolutely no control over. I'm reminded this every time A W U S goes down and it's like all the internet dies whenever A W S has an issue, like fundamentally, we rely on amazon to keep its data centers up to like live our lives and that's bockers .

yeah and also hilarious is just that like we've so totally broken the internet as this like mesh network, that literally, if you and I were in the same room recording this call, all of our data would probably be bouncing off of U. S. East one in ashburn, Virginia and back to each other's laptops just that weekend.

Collaborate well. So I think there's a bunch of other interesting problems. I mean, like there's interesting chAllenges around like you know the networking stuff, right? It's called the browser, not a keeper.

But all this APP that i'm looking at right now as we're talking when I close and open, the tb is not can be saved. I can't come back to this work and the browser er really assumes that you're just kind of raising as you use your computer, but it's become the main platform for software. And so then there's electron, which is like a wrapper around a browser with a bunch of bell and whistles.

Ls, but like all this stuff feels kind of unsatisfying. I think you know it's tough when, like the incentives of the organization that builds the most important piece of software on your computer are to sell your ads, like the platform we all live every day and is run by an ad company. Yes, lots of great people of google, they care about these problems.

But like there's just an incentive structure here but not favorable for solving these problems. And so there's some of that dimension. But I think in terms of like value and priority, I think one thing that we are really interested in that income switch is what we call malarious software after Philip heros PHD.

And this is this idea that, like, we live in this weird world where like computers again, are meant to be this like very powerful compositional informational environment, but increasingly, like all of the software we use are these like closed boxes that are given to you by somebody else and you can't do anything with, you know. And so i'd like to think of the ideal computing environment as being like a wood's shop or a kitchen. Like in my kitchen, I can make indian food, japanese food. I can go and, like reheat some leftovers and like I have not too many kitchen edges, but like you can go a long way with a chef's knife and a cutting board and like you stand mixer yeah, it's a measurement ments. Like you can do a lot with like a few good elements, but like the software world is very much like you oh, this note taking up can't open the notes for that not taking up.

And so I think a lot about like once we have local first software for us, this is really just the first step, right? If the software is local first and you have the software, then, just like if you bring shelving home from my car, yeah, you can decide whether or not you want to put all the shelves in or if you want to set IT up on its side or or right, if you want to cut the legs off the chairs because you're short, you know, you want to painted a different color to match your space. We're really interested in this problem of like once we have the software, can we start actually to use IT? Can we make IT our own? As we see the local first movement start to build steam, we see so many people getting involved.

Our vision is starting to look forward to like the next frontier, which is actually empowering users to not have to care about these things, but to be able to care about these things, right? And in your home, if you have a chAllenge, you might go to the hardware store and buy the things and fix IT for yourself, or you might hire a handyman, or maybe you live in an apartment you call your super right. But whatever that relationship you have to that space is, is something that you can have an agency and make choices about. We think that all computing environments should have those properties, and we want to start figuring out how to bring that next to the broader world. And and that's kind of where we think about where this goes after we start to see local softer kick out.

This is how kind of heady, I know, but the APP that I was thinking about that helped me understand the idea is this no taking APP called upon you refuse. That is pretty popular. Great abilities is, above all, just an apple download to your computer that reads and rates texts.

Iles, if you boil IT all the way down, that's what IT is. The company offers a service for thinking your files, but that's a separate thing. And if subsidies goes out of business, you can always sink through google drive or drop box or lots of other things.

And ebi dian is built on a plugin system, so the main APP is really basic, but you can add all kinds of functionality just by downloading a bit of code or even writing some yourself. If the city and ever goes away, you'll still have the APP. If a plug in ever disappears, you'll still have the version you installed.

And if, for some reason, wait down the road, the APP ever stops working entirely, you'll still have your holder of text files because that's all IT is anyway, and you can just take them somewhere else observing. The company is building new tools for sharing and publishing and lots of other stuff because, again, the cloud is a good thing. There are lots of upside, but you don't have to use any of them.

And if fbc dian goes away, you'll still have obsidian that is local first software right there. I love IT, right? We have said one more break and then we have one more big idea of that software. Talk about we'll be right back.

All right, were back as I was working on this episode and trying to figure out what IT means to take back some control of our software and our devices. I was also reading a new book called the internet cn by cory doctor. You've never heard of cory.

He's an activist and author and blogger, and he's been thinking about the way that the internet should work for a really long time. And this book is basically a step by step guide for how to take down the tech giants. He argues, as he often does, that the internet is run by a few huge companies, that a problem and we should stop IT.

Most of that is a conversation for another day. And I don't agree with all of Christ thoughts on this subject, but it's a really good book, is really interesting and worth reading. The thing that jumped out at me most about IT was corries specific idea for how to improve our tax situation. He doesn't argue for breaking up the tech giants or reinventing capitalism altogether, though I suspected be cool both of those things. He actually makes the case that interOperability different apps and platforms, being compatible with one another is pretty close to a one stop fix for everything.

Ever since I read the book, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that idea that maybe instead of going back to having all my data only on my device or only using software that works offline, the solution is just to make IT so easy to move between services that a few of them going away wouldn't make a difference. I guess like if the whole internet goes down, you're still in trouble, but won't be a trouble anyway if the internet was down. Anyway, I want to understand why cory thought in a rap was the answer, like a the answer. So I called them to figure out out.

The biggest picture thing you talk about is interpret ability and the idea that what we should do is, by hook or by crook, open all these platforms to each other and to others.

And then I think if i'm not misunderstanding this, web standards are the fastest way to get there, right? Like I feel like i've spent the last year or so talking to people in betting on the idea that like the open web can be the solution to a lot of our platforming problems. If only we allowed IT to be your you're making a face.

Tell me we think so. I would say it's not quite web standards are how we get there because first of all, web standards are our Mandatory. So we ve versions of embraced and extend. So I would say that there has to be a two pronged approach. One is rules about what you must do.

So we might say to facebook, you have to open up a gateway and that might be through legislation, but that might be through a settlement, right? Like facebook and twitter and all these other companies, they're just incapable of coLoring within the lines. They're just like pathetic logical cheaters.

And so they are all already under multiple ftc consent decrees and european commission consent decrees on, and they're all violating them. They're all eventually going to be dragged into a situation where they gonna seek a settlement. And so we might, as a settlement, say you have to stand up these gateways.

But like in theory, that the E. U legislation .

about interOperability between messaging apps. That's the kind of thing .

you're talking about ah and the digital markets, it's not just messaging apps. It's a whole bunch of different platforms. They're just starting with messaging, which we can talk about this later, I think is a mistake. Ah they should be starting with social media messaging if they screw IT up is gonna like expose dissidents and other people to leaks in their messaging.

And yeah, it's like the next gemot acoje was murdered the way shamoon acoje was by someone exploiting a defect in the inter messaging tools that he uses to lure them to his death is going to describe this whole project is a huge mistake. But it's not just those Mandates, right? Like cause that's gonna ll out over ten years.

In the in parallel, there's like facebook violating its concentrating google to violations, concentrate its twitter violating all of these other rules, you know, and they're going to in paralo with this, someone might just say like, okay, well, if you wanted not be fined ten ex your market cap and live to fight another day, you're gonna have to consent to standing up this interOperable gateway. Twitter is going to have to offer a activity pub gateway or something, right? And the problem with that is it's very hard to administer that remedy.

And we're getting into some wacky sort of public administration stuff here. But like say we say to facebook, uh, you have to stand up a gateway to activity pub s so people can leave good or master on server but still be connected to the people that matter to them and the customers and the communities and all the things that they are sort of glue to facebook by. But then facebook shuts down that gateway and says, we shut IT down because we thought there was another car janala cua that was stealing a billion users data, which is a thing that actual future campaign inc.

Are onna try to do. We are going to try to exploit this. A P. A. We just saw, you know, twenty three and me gets scraped for however many million osh canoes, genetic records, and which, just like up as an ohga azi person, a very creepy sentence to say, you know. And so we gonna want them to, like, have an intrusion detection system in a fire wall and security engineers.

But how do you distinguish the pretext from the reality, right, when facebook says we're shutting this down once a week because we're worried about violence and active attacks, when everybody understands facebook infrastructure, is to a first approximation of facebook employee and you're like deposing these people in spending like years, arguing about whether this was a pretext or not. In the meantime, the new market entrance, these master on servers or whatever IT is that have stood up to like welcome in facebook, refugees that were evacuating from facebook, those users are learning that they can't rely on them, the financiers, the banks. So the individuals who funded them are learning that you shouldn't fund these projects.

And the people who started them are learning that it's not a it's not a fruitful thing to do with their time, is a waste their time. So you also need to relegate ze, the stuff that facebook did to my space. So when facebook started, everybody was my space user, and they didn't just say, hey, come hang out on facebook.

We have a Better user interface. Eventually your friends might show up, and in the meantime you could admire our great color choices. They said, like, here's a bot, give IT your log in, give IT your password.

It'll go to my space several times a day. And person ate you, log in, scrape your inbox, put in your facebook in box, will let you autopilot responses back out to facebook. So you you took my space, who can eat your cake and have a too.

So what if we relegate zed that conduct? Because, you know, when people try to do that to facebook, like power ventures did or og or other other tools that have popped up to do this to facebook, facebook just suits them into like radioactive rubble, right? Computer from abuse act dmc twelve, a one tortuous interference contract, patent trimark copyright, all these other kind of this ticket of what we call IP, but which is like the right to control the conduct of your customers, critics and and competitors.

And so if we re legal ize that conduct, then those new market entrance who facebook locks out of their A P I, could fall back to scraping bots, reverse engineering and other tools. Now that gorilla warfare with facebook in general, I think facebook will lose that over the long run. Because for facebook to we just successfully defend this, they need to make zero mistakes.

And to successful ly attack their offences, you need to find one mistake. And so that will privilege them. But I also think facebook would, all other things being equal, prefer a managed solution where the API is reliable to a situation where they cannot use the law to stop these adversarial into Operators, because gilla warfare represents a unquantifiable risk to facebook and shareholders do not like surprises.

And we saw a facebook lose a quarter of a trillion dollars after their first report of twenty twenty two to their shareholders when they revealed that um they IT wasn't even contraction. IT was less growth than they had anticipated among U. S.

Users and the people who bore the brunt of that stock crash were the managers who made the decisions that LED to the reduction in users, right? Because they're the ones who portfolios are primarily stuff ed with facebook stock, right, more than anyone else in the least diverse shareholders, right? And so if we say to facebook, to the decision makers at facebook, if you break your A P I, you will have to contend with gorilla warfare.

And that gorilla warfare will produce the surprises that will make you personally significantly poor. Then I think we align their incentives. But of course, no one ever lost money by betting on the hubris of tech executives. So if they do go ahead and do this, then we have a fall back. That's what I mean by like an administrative remedy, right at an actual plan that looks at what facebook is doing that harms people, what stop people from getting out of harms way, what will moderate those harms and what will do when facebook takes a counter measure to recover its superNormal profits at the expensive everyday users and how we will counter that one like .

much lower stakes thing you're making me me think about is like i'm an obsessive user of note taking apps and switch between them constantly.

Are you and ever no casualty?

Oh, yes. And this is kind. This is actually where I was going, is one of the first things you do. If you build a note taking apps, you build a every note importer because there are a lot of people who have hated every note because it's been very bad for ten years, who are stuck there because they have thousands of notes and they want to leave and ever note makes you, makes you export in this, like that E N E X file that is preparatory, but also everyone else has figured out how to manage IT.

And so I can now, with two clicks, pull all of my evernote notes into some other APP, which has made IT possible to leave ever note for tons and tons of people who otherizing would not have been allowed out. And what IT is in social is like i'm stuck in every for the rest of my life, because IT is so hard to switch that I will put up with whatever nonsense there is just to be here. And like the no taking is such a smaller version of IT but is like that's how I should.

That's a great example because one of the reasons that that's true is that ever note started they started early. If ever note that started later when they were when they were Better developed, more reliable and more widely understood strategies for blocking that reverse engineering, you know, if if they were encysted those databases, then bypassing the encryption would be unlawful.

If you could only access those database through an APP that blocked scraping and autopilot, then they could use terms of service violations to stop you from running something locally that just iterated through every you note you had in, then spit IT out, right? So like IT shows you that while Mandates tes are important, right, we could, if ever note we're large enough and and enough of a hazard. You could imagine a future in whichever note was legally required to offer you an export tool, but you don't actually need IT.

Some of the time, some of the time rival firms can just work this out. And that's what apple did with with microsoft office. You know, I was tell the door in the book. I was A A france cio running, you know, the networks for all these smaller medium companies. And a typical company would have a twenty people with windows pcs and a designer with a mac.

And if you try to send that designer a word file and a cell file and office file, and they tried to open into my mac office, IT would either not work, or then after they make changes and saved that, I would be corrupt. Or, you know, some variation. I only you to do is like wave the mac office floppy around and files would spontaneously corrupt.

And I just started, like, first I put pcs on those designers desks that they used as dedicated office work stations. And then when that became on Willy, I put the graphics cards in their pcs and got them, quark, anna dobe, for for their PC. And through away their mac.

And apple figured out this was happening. And so they just got engineers to reverse engineer office. And so we get, I work sweet pages, numbers and keynote that reads and rights the microsoft office files.

And then the really interesting thing is what microsoft did because after a few rounds of aggressively changing those file format s and occurring their own engineering expenses, because then they have to update all their own windows software they suit for peace, and they standardized the office file formats, which is why we have the x at the end of the X, L S X and PPT x and talk x, which stands for excel. And this is why you can now pay sale text between word, google dogs, web forms. You know, medium has a passion for IT, right? Like a few composing on medium.

I bet your cms does. I know the verge has got its own cm s that you guys built from scratch, but you probably just imported up like a reference library for parsing at those things so you can compose and word or dogs and IT just works. And so like at a certain point, when you have to use engineers to block into a probability instead of lawyers, then you just give up, because lawyers solve the problem forever, right? Lawyers teach every financier, every entrepreneur and every user don't trust interOperable solutions engineers. They have to fight and fight and fight, and eventually they lose in these wars of attraction. And so once you take away the lawyers, the company's super peace.

at least as far as I can tell, like mastered on and sort of what the whole activity pub world represent is like the closest extent thing to the kind of inner Operate ability that you're talking about yeah .

an activity pub came out of the three c at the same time as all this bad generalization was happening. And the reason that the good standard emerged without being interfering with, I think, is that the big test companies didn't believe that would matter enough to sabotage, wasn't like they couldn't. It's just that they chose not to.

And they could have submarines, all kinds pryderi advantages and so on into IT, and they just didn't. And as a result, we got this thing that just kind of snuck in under the radar because no one thought I was important. It's a bit like what happened with the web itself, right? Where like nobody took the web seriously ay enough.

When the web came along, the fight was between a well on compuserve. And just like nobody took IT seriously enough. So tiburon sly was able to make a thing that microsoft didn't extinguish the way they were going after arrival, online services.

And then by the time the web took off enough, tried afterwards, right? IT became a success, and microsoft tried all these variations. You know, if you remember, there was a time when M S N meant something new every six months, because they would replace unch MSN as some proprietary thing that was like the web, but not the web.

That was blackbird at one time. All this suffer, they are just trying to a lure people into walking into a proprietary technology stack to extinguish the web. And like, I just snuck kin under the radar.

Nobody was paying attention to IT. And then all the sudden IT was there and IT was like, too big to kill. And you know, I think that activity pop kind of fits that that window just snuck in when I was looking.

What do you make of the fact that like atomic era is constantly saying the reds, which is not currently federated close platform, is going to be part of like this data is that a company see changes that just a guy saying the right thing at the right moment.

Well, I I think that even people of goodwill, can I talk themselves into doing bad things like let's stipulate that macy is completely sincere, right? But in two years, there's four hundred million daily users of threads and they just rationalize that opening those users up to federation would expose them to risks that facebook is currently able to defend them from, that they have the, you know, moderation tools and the other things that are needed to prevent this information, harassment and so on. And federating will expose new risk to those users. And it's just unfair to those users.

which to some extent is not untrue.

Chp is particularly if you have a bunch of users who become accustomed to certain practices that don't take account of the risks but also the benefits of ation. And so you just dropped them into the deep end. And so the way that you protect your future week self is for your present strong self to do something that is a revocable in that service.

So like we call these uses these packs, right? Uses in the the tail is a hacker. He doesn't want to fill his ears with wax when they sell through the sea. The sirens, uh, to prevent their calls from lorrine him to his death in the sea, he wants to hear them.

So in this moment of strength, before he's hearing the sons call, he has a sailors lashing to the mass and says, whatever I do, don't untie me so that I can live through this. I can experience the benefits of my strength, even in a moment of weakness. And we've all done versions of this, right? You throw away the rios that you go on a diet, right? That's a form of illness is pack.

Open source licenses are a form of ellis pack because they're all a revocable right every time. And I P lawyer who isn't who isn't familiar with open source first encounters on open or free license like to gpl or even the psd license or whatever they go like, oh, this is, this is dumb. Everyone must have missed this. This should have a way for you to revoke the license later if you change your mind. And that is not a bug.

It's a feature because when your investors come to you and say, well, this was cute, but if you want one hundred and fifty people you convince to quit their jobs and put their kids college funds on the line to come work for you to have a job next week, you're going to make this open source proprietary next week and you can just say, like you're the boss, but I can't like I just can't and so you're for facebook to say, well, someday this will be open. Trust us, given the company's track record as bananas, right? Because facebook in two thousand six, their pitch to myspace users was like, you love your friends.

But did you know that the evil crap in australian billionaire who wants myspace with her murdoch spies on you with every hour? That god sense facebook is the service that will never spy on you? That was their pitching, two thousand and six, right? We are the surveilLance free social media platform, and we always will be.

And in two thousand and eight, they pull their users and said, we're gna start buying on you. Is this okay with you? And they said, no.

And they did IT anyway, right? So like as gore bush taught us, right? Fool me once. Shame on me. Fool me twice.

We don't get fooled again, right? And and you know what would be a more compelling thing than promising to federate federated, right? And if they're not federated, then all IT is as a latent capability. And like computers are turning complete universal annoyin machines. So every capability is latent in every service, right? Like unless there's some means by which users can discipline executives who take bad choices, then we should expect those executives to fall pray to the same folly and rationalization that all of us are capable love yeah.

And I think this is not the year of the mind of their sort of two approaches. One is to essentially Mandate that threads Better. It's like put into law that if you have to have activity, pub, the other one is blow open enough holes or make IT legal for people to blow up and holes in such a way that someone else will do IT for them. And there's nothing that threats can do about IT.

I think this is more like two part of boxy, right, every series into probability, the right to reverse engineer and stuff the D F, F. We call this come calm competitive compatibility, because average al interpretations.

so hard to say.

is very good. Comm come is great. So calm come is great. But IT is unstable, right? Because you are finding a blind spot in the intrigant detection system or the anti automation staff and you're exploited IT and you're making IT work.

You're playing a cat mouse game with thousands of engineers designed .

to stop you yeah, I mean, they have to make no mistakes. You have to find one mistake. You can stop, pile twenty vulnerabilities and roll them out one after another as they club one and then the other.

There are lots of ways that this will be at advantages, but IT is unstable. You know, in the days when mint started, they were scraping like six thousand different bank websites. And if the bank took act to counter measures to block them, they couldn't overcome.

What they would do is if you were a mint user, they would just pop up a message that says, like, sorry, bank of amErica customer, we are no longer capable of scraping this account. Here is the phone number of the lawyer who sends the cnd for a bank of america. Call them up until the me, your bank of amErica customer who wants to access your own financial data, right? So there are lots of ways around this.

And Mandates, on the other hand, you know, formal, formal requirements. As we said, they're hard to enforce our minister, but they are very strong right of firms, actually huge to a standard. The standard works.

You know, you never buy a USB cigarette inter adapter at a in a fish bow of gas station only to find that IT doesn't work in your cigarettes or recepticle in your car. IT standards really work, but they're brittle. So you have something that is very flexible, but but also doesn't hold very well.

And then you have something that is very strong, but is easy to break. And you combine the two and you get two part of proxy, something that is resilient but strong. And that's that's why I think we need to combine both of these approaches.

And that's why we need to understand that what tech has done through its regulatory capture is, on the one hand, get broad latitude to abuse us and on the other hand, create broad prohibitions on self help. And we need to reverse that circumstance so that we have broad prohibitions on abusive conduct by tech firms, whether they are larger, small. And we have broad latitude as users to take measures to help ourselves .

after all this time and effort and amazon purchases and docker downloads, i've now built a couple of things that stick. I have a plex server, which rules, and I now use IT all the time. I also now have all my notes in a collection of text files, and i'll never use another note taking APP that doesn't read and write to that folder of text files stored on my computer.

The two apps i'm switching between right now, if you're curious, are note, plan and up. Dian obsidian, like we are talking about, is super powerful, but no planes just really pretty. So I just keep coming back to IT.

I also still have image running, but docker takes up too much memory on my computer most of the time, so I mostly don't use IT. I did rig up away to use my building mini PC as a universal file back up for all my stuff. But I also still have everything in google drive to because cloud services are great.

So much easier to get up my stuff in google drive. I just like having options, and I like that. My stuff works now, even when A W, S or google cloud doesn't or when i'm on the train and don't have any wifi at all.

I'm not really doing all this for big moral reasons or because i'm afraid the cloud is going to get center and rule us all or because I think we should destroy the tech giants. I just like my stuff being my stuff, and I don't think that too much to ask. Sorry, that's IT for the verge cast today.

Thanks so much to everyone who is on the show, and thank you is always for listening. This is the last epsom in our connectivity series. The whole series has been super funny. If you miss the early episodes, go check out and we have another fun many series coming up starting next week, so stay tuned. This shows produced by engineering and liam James. The verge cast is a verge production and part of the box media podcast network will be back with episodes on wednesday and friday talking about anti trust als and video games and lots of other stuff. See them rock.

Support for the show comes from a new york magazines. The strategist, the strategist helps people who want to shop the internet smartly. Its editors are reporters, testers and obsessives. You can think of them as your shop holic friends who Carry equally about function, value, innovation and good taste.

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