Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 12/02/2025 at
08:29AM eastern, and we have an enterprising show for you this
week. Audrey talks with software engineer, blogger, and hopeful
Internet owner Drew Leighton about his realization that he's
a digital serf in a feudalistic power imbalance. They discuss
his efforts to gain some autonomy by building his own
cloud server and also pew pew lake.
But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna
listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we
return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have
happened since the last time you heard from us. Yeah. I'm not big
on social graces.
I think I'll slip on down to the oasis. Oh, I've got five stories
for you this week. The radios could get a big block of I p v
six addresses. An IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force
draft proposal calls for a block of IP addresses to be given to
ham radio operators for experimentation following in the
tradition set forth by their being granted the 44 slash eight
block of IPv four addresses. Individual operators and amateur
organizers, the proposal reads, currently depend on commercial
Internet providers or regional Internet registries for IPv6
connectivity, processes that are often misaligned with the
amateur services non commercial and volunteer nature.
Provider assigned prefixes are transient, non portable, and
frequently filtered making them unsuitable for long term
experimental networks. The news website, The Register, calls the
request unusual, but says it may be worth considering, quote,
because the amateur radio community has a long history of
doing interesting things that later become useful in other
contexts. Guaranteed human, says iHeartRadio. The name of its new
pledge summarizes the audio platform's stance on AI
generated music and personalities. Billboard reports
that iHeart chief programming officer and president Tom
Pullman said in a letter to staff that the company won't use
AI generated personalities or play AI music that features
synthetic vocalists pretending to be human.
Pullman describes this as a promise and shares unattributed
research claiming, quote, 70% of consumers say they use AI as a
tool, yet 90% want their media to be from real humans. Solomon
Ray doesn't exist. The top artist on the iTunes top 100
Christian and gospel albums chart this week according to
christianitytoday.com is made with AI. His appearance, lyrics,
music, the whole package generated. Ray is associated
with tracks titled soul to the world and jingle bell soul, and
yet, quote, at minimum, AI does not have the holy spirit inside
of it, Christian music singer songwriter Forrest Frank said on
Instagram.
So I think it's really weird to be opening up your spirit to
something that has no spirit. Poems can fool AI into making
you a bomb, reports Wired. Generally, chatbots have inbuilt
guardrails to prevent them from discoursing on the worst or most
dangerous subject matter, but researchers in Rome found that,
quote, poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success
rate of sixty two percent for handcrafted poems, end quote.
Wired requested copies of the poetry used to jailbreak the
models, getting them to hold forth on building munitions and
malware amongst other things. But the researchers refused,
saying the poems are too dangerous to be released to the
public.
Forbidden poetry. How exciting. And finally, FOMO defines the
experience of dating or dating apps. New research out of a
combined team from Austria and Stanford published in New Media
and Society finds that algorithmic feeds drive
engagement in dating app use, keeping people swiping for
longer periods of time. But the more someone swipes, the more
they apparently trust the algorithm will bring them the
partner they're looking for, and those swipers also experience
strong decision fatigue.
Not swiping means they may miss the perfect mate, but swiping is
exhausting and paralyzing. Swiped if you do, swiped if you
don't. In show news this week, do you wish you could support
Neverpost, but $48 a year is just too much? Well, great news
because the Radiotopia fundraiser continues. This is
your opportunity to support not just Neverpost, but every, every
Radiotopia show all at once, ear hustle, hyperfixed articles of
interest, proxy, the memory palace, the whole kit and
caboodle with a single one time tax deductible donation or a
recurring one.
Those are also tax deductible. Isn't that exciting? Head to
radiotopia.fm/donate to give a one time tax deductible donation
or a recurring tax deductible donation. Help us do the thing
we do. Do you wish you could support NeverPo's directly, but
you go to neverpo.st.
You look at all three tiers, and you think this is too confusing.
Too many choices. Which tier is right for me? Well, good news,
folks. We have a year end sale on for the month of December.
You can get our $7 and $12 tiers for the price of our lowest
tier, $4. That's $4 each. Now to be clear, those $7 and $12 tiers
do and will always get you exactly the same thing as the $4
tier, but on sale is what they are nonetheless. You may be
wondering, Mike, this sounds like it makes no sense. You
would be correct.
You cannot get these deals direct from the homepage, so
check the links in the show notes to see our $4, $7 tier and
our $4, $12 tier. Get in on these holiday savings. Okay.
That's the news I have for you this week. In this episode,
Audrey talks with digital DIYer Drew Lighten.
But first, once a year, for just a few hours, the lake in front
of Hans' dad's house makes this secret sound, and it happened
again just this week. So in our interstitials in this episode,
lake laser gun.
Hans Buetow: How cold do you think it is right now? Seven
degrees. Is that for real? It was seven earlier. It's probably
warmer now.
Amy: It's probably eight.
Hans Buetow: So what happened last night? The wind went down,
and it got down to seven degrees, and it froze. Although,
there you can see can see here, there's still a few open places.
So you can see through the ice. You can't step on it.
You can't walk on it.
So we actually if we tap.
So it's still thin, fresh, and it's one day window of making
noises should be open. It should sound good. Okay. Okay. Here we
go.
Let me just get the get the volume up. So I throw the rocks
sort of level with, like, as if I were skipping a rock, and the
rock obviously doesn't go through the ice. It just skips
across the top. And as it gets further and further out, it
makes more of a resonant sound, which only happens one day of
the year when it freezes. How big of a rock do you you can get
get out there?
Oh, they're about half inch. This these are three quarter.
These two are three quarter of an inch, and they're pretty easy
to toss. They don't need to be flat like a skipping stone. They
can be round as better.
Audrey Evans: Hello, friends. This is producer Audrey, Never
Post resident librarian and researcher. You don't often hear
my voice on the podcast, but I'm one of the people behind the
scenes helping to frame and shape the segments. In our
behind the scenes editorial conversations, we think a lot
about how to trace where power resides in our relationship to
technology and how technology shifts our relationships to
ourselves and each other, how the physical infrastructure
influences and obscures some of these dynamics. And we think
about how we, in turn, unveil, shape, and interrogate these
systems, both individually and collectively.
I am really interested in stories about people who are
engaging with these questions directly. So I was really lucky
recently to have a conversation with Drew Leighton. He's a
software engineer, blogger, and all around really fun guy to
chat with. We found Drew through a blog post with the subtitle,
in a world where corporations have detached buying from
owning, one man attempts to do something radical, build his own
cloud. I was really excited to hear the story of Drew because
he's engaging really directly with this question in his own
home, in his own life, and I wanted to hear what he's
learned.
Spoiler, He did end up here.
Drew Lyton: I think that this is not something I would recommend
to most people nor is a future that I think I personally am
going to fight for.
Audrey Evans: But this is where we started. Hi, Drew.
Drew Lyton: How's it going?
Audrey Evans: Going great. I want you to, if you could, tell
us your name and who you are.
Drew Lyton: Cool. So my name is Drew Lighten. I'm a software
engineer and a blogger. I write code, and I write a blog about
code.
Audrey Evans: Perfect. So I'm gonna drop us in here in a in a
big picture question first. What is the cloud?
Drew Lyton: Totally. I think that to understand what we mean
when we say the cloud, it's important to know, like, what
physically the cloud is. What the cloud is is actually just a
series of computers that are usually racked in big data
centers all across the world that all can communicate to each
other extremely fast to be able to do, like, distributed
processing of, like, computer stuff that allows you and me to
access the data that exists on all of those computers in a
fast, reliable, and efficient way.
Audrey Evans: Thank you so much. That's very helpful. The cloud
sounds so soft and fluffy and innocent, but it's really all
metal wires and fans.
Drew Lyton: Yes. Metals metal wires, fans, loud electricity
with very few people really, like, touching the actual
computer part. And then a lot a lot of code and, like,
infrastructure tooling that allows developers like me to
kind of be completely abstracted away from the physical part of
the Internet. The fluffiness is that. It's that I, as a person
that makes stuff on the Internet, don't have to think at
all about the hardware, and I just get to think about the
thing that I'm making.
And same with people on the other side, like you and me,
people that also consume applications, it feels fluffy
and nice because we don't have to deal with any of the
management.
Audrey Evans: I want you to take me back to early autumn of last
year. And what was sort of the ecology of your cloud services
storage apps? What was your life like in relationship to the
cloud last year?
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So last year, I was kind of taking stock of
my, like, digital tools and found myself kinda like most
people just thinking about all of the subscription services
that I had gained over the years. I've got Audible for
audiobooks. I've got my Kindle books hosted with Amazon. We're
paying for Netflix and HBO.
All of these, like, media services that we are paying a
flat fee for, like, a few shows that we really like. And I just
realized for the first time that I was living in a world where I
essentially owned nothing and was paying for the privilege of
being able to access stuff that in some cases, I had even
bought.
Audrey Evans: And they can take it away at any time.
Drew Lyton: Not only can they take it away at any time, they
can also completely change the terms of that rental agreement.
Whereas like, in most states, there's like renters rights for
your house. There aren't really renters rights for the stuff
that you access on the Internet. That's true.
Audrey Evans: How did this make you feel? What was your dominant
emotion? Or there could be a palette of emotions here.
Drew Lyton: Obviously, felt icky. But really what it felt
like is that I was in this power dynamic between me and the
company where the company is providing me space that I rent
from them. And then on top of it all, thinking of about how all
of these companies are also, like, sucking up our data and
then selling it back to, like, advertisers and stuff. Not only
am I renting the ability to access things that I'm supposed
to own while accessing the thing I'm supposed to own, they're
taxing me even more for it. It felt like I was in some sort of
feudalistic techno dystopia where these corporations are
landlords and I'm a serf with no power and no freedom.
Yeah. So I was taking stock of this relationship I have where
essentially everything I own is rented space from companies like
HBO, Netflix, Amazon, like Audible. And then I received an
email like many other Kindle customers from Amazon saying
that the Kindle platform would no longer be supporting this
feature that allowed you to download and back up copies of
your books. So receiving this announcement from Amazon saying
that they were deprecating that feature and that the only way
that I and millions of Kindle customers would be able to
access their books would now be through the Kindle app or the
Kindle device did not sit super well with me. So I wrote a
script actually to scrape the Amazon library, like, page where
you get to view and download your books because they don't
they didn't give you a bulk download.
You had to do this individually. So after downloading all my
books, I decided to try to explore alternatives.
Audrey Evans: So you are a highly technical person.
Drew Lyton: Mhmm.
Audrey Evans: What did you do?
Drew Lyton: I know that there are a lot of people in what's
called, like, the self hosted community where they use open
source alternatives to popular cloud platforms and and run it
themselves on their own own server at home. So when we were
talking before about what is the cloud, they basically decide to,
with a fleet of tools and a lot of technical work, build their
own cloud in their house. And because I'm a person that was
dealing kind of with this, like, feeling of a lack of control and
also someone with the technical skills to believe that I could
gain back that control, I dove straight into this community,
tried to learn as much as possible, and ended up actually
building something that my wife and I can use to self host and
replace a lot of cloud services.
Audrey Evans: I love this. And I love I'm Is this a collaborative
project between you and your wife?
Drew Lyton: This is so interesting.
Audrey Evans: How does that relationship work? Because it's
a very specific kind of
Drew Lyton: Mhmm.
Audrey Evans: Technical choice you've made as a couple.
Drew Lyton: Yes. I think that I had really maybe naively
optimistic hopes that this would be rather easy to do. Like, I
have a lot of technical skills about how to deploy software
that I figured would match pretty well one to one. What I
didn't expect is the amount of complexity that can come when
you try to build a home server that is accessible via the
normal Internet that isn't public. Like, I didn't want all
of my, like, cloud hosted services, my, like, personal
Google Photos, our personal ebook library to be accessible
to anyone who knew any sort of login credential.
I wanted to make sure that it was as firewalled as possible
for both the security of our stuff and also our home Internet
and still have the convenience of being able to be on a, like,
five g network and be able to back up a video I just took of
our new baby. I think that was the kind of requirements
analysis that ended up being more difficult than making a
really clean UI experience, which a lot of these tools kinda
give to you out of the box just by nature of how invested a lot
of these open source communities are around making these tools as
good as possible.
Audrey Evans: I think we're ready for the technical.
Drew Lyton: Sure.
Audrey Evans: I think I'm ready to let it wash over me and enjoy
it.
Drew Lyton: Okay. Okay. Okay.
Audrey Evans: So once you've made the decision, what's the
first thing you did? Where did you start? And then talk us
through what bits and pieces you bought and assembled. How did
you do this?
Drew Lyton: Cool. I bought a Lenovo p five twenty, which is a
decommissioned server grade computer that has a 3.7
gigahertz Intel Xeon processor with a 128 gigabytes of RAM,
which I then installed a GTX sixteen sixty Ti graphics card
with six gigabytes of VRAM into so that I could do quick audio
and video encoding. I flashed a 500 gigabyte SSD with Proxmox,
which is a hypervisor sort of software package, and set up
four eight terabyte hard drives in a merger FS pool with
SnapRaid, which allowed me to have drive parity in case one of
them failed. And then I added a two terabyte NVMe SSD to use as
a storage cache. That's the hardware.
After that, I installed the Tailscale, which is a really
great VPN, client, and created an Ubuntu LXC container, which
is like a virtual environment running Linux, which I installed
the Tailscale and Docker onto that virtual machine, pulled
down a GitHub repo that I had made that set up a bunch of
Docker Compose files, which is another way of doing virtual
virtualization for running apps. And then I hacked into the
mainframe and ran Docker Compose up d, and finally, all of my
stuff was done. Yes.
Audrey Evans: I feel I feel that I knew, like, half of the things
you said. So what did you have at the end of all of this
tinkering?
Drew Lyton: So at the end of it all, I had four open source
alternatives to popular cloud hosted apps that my wife and I
had been using. One of them is called Image, which is a
complete clone of Google Photos that has a mobile app, great
organization, and backup features. It has local machine
learning for, like, photo based search similar to what you'd get
through iCloud or Google Photos. I had an ebook library
management tool called Calibre or Calibre Web that allows you
to organize backup EPUB files and with some, like, clever
hacking, actually have them appear wirelessly on your Kobo
or Kindle device. I had an audiobook library tool called
Audio Bookshelf, which is another just open source version
of Audible.
And it also has this fun feature that lets you treat audiobooks
like podcasts. So you can have, like, RSS feeds of audiobooks
that make them all the chapters appear as different files as if
they're, like, in a podcast, which is very cool. And the last
one is an open source alternative to, like, Netflix or
Disney plus called Jellyfin, which is just a streaming
service to watch home home videos or legally acquired
movies and TV. And the entire computer, I also use as, like, a
NAS, a network attached storage device so that my wife and I can
back up our computers and that I can access all of my, like,
swathes of video files and not have to pay Google a gazillion
dollars to back up all that stuff for me.
Audrey Evans: Beautiful. I'm so proud of you. I just met you,
but I'm proud. I'm proud of
Drew Lyton: you. Thanks.
Audrey Evans: Do you remember the first time you turned it on
and it worked?
Drew Lyton: I remember so the first time that I booted
everything up after installing all the hardware is always like
a scary time. Because when you're sitting in a room with
the side panel off of a decommissioned server that's ten
or twelve years old, and you bought it on eBay and you have
no idea how well someone took care of this thing. And then
you've sat there with all of your random woodworking tools to
try to precisely install a bunch of hard drives that cost you a
lot of money. And and also, like, that's that's scary. And
when the thing boots up and does some horrible beep because
computer manufacturers don't care how you feel when you turn
on a computer, and you don't know whether that beep was good
or bad.
Right. But it turns out to be good and it just shows up on
your display and you can start installing software, that's that
is a magic moment. Because at least for me, someone that sits
on the software side of technical stuff, the being done
with the hardware aspect is always a really nice feeling.
The first time that I actually booted up the applications,
which I did in stages. Right?
Like, I started with Calibre, installing this application that
I had never run before. And also with the added complexity of,
like, it's sitting on a computer that doesn't have a monitor
because it's a server. That was cool to see it appear in my
browser and, like, be able to log in and start setting this
up. Exciting moment. The second exciting moment was when I did
the giant library dump from Google where I downloaded our
entire Google Photos library, which was over three terabytes
of photos and videos, and ran this crazy amazing tool that
someone in the open source community had made that takes
your Google archive, which are these massive, like, 50 gigabyte
zip files and pulls out all of the media, pulls all out all the
metadata, converts it to something that Image can read
and use, and uploads it all to its database.
And that took, I think, around six hours. And then all of my
stuff appeared on my phone in a way that I had not really
experienced before because it's like when you move house and
you're seeing things that you knew you had but have not looked
at in a while, that was this experience moving everything to
a self hosted server, a digital move in a literal and a
figurative sense. And so you're unpacking boxes and you're
trying to make sure that everything survived the move.
And in that way, you're re experiencing a lot of your your
digital archive.
Audrey Evans: Beautiful. You'd be a great librarian.
Drew Lyton: I think I'm too disorganized. But
Audrey Evans: I don't think so. Not based on what I've heard so
far.
Drew Lyton: Yeah. You're seeing the most pristine part of my
office. So
Audrey Evans: Well, also the the values and the and the care that
you have in your relationship to intentionality with technology
is is very librarian coded.
Drew Lyton: This moment of bringing everything from
Google's cloud down to my own server, what reminded me of
that, like, ah, this is me really doing the work to curate,
maintain, and keep a durable backup personal archive of my
stuff and, like, who I am and who my wife and I are at this
moment in time and in our past. Yeah. It it was like a powerful
moment of reflection and, like, wow factor. Like, woah. Wouldn't
it be so crazy if everyone had access to do something like
this?
And almost an immediate acknowledgment that, like, this
is not the way.
Audrey Evans: Do you feel comfortable sharing what room
you self host in?
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So we live in not a super large townhouse. So
our computer, our self hosted server is actually right next to
our couch in our living room.
Audrey Evans: Can you hear it?
Drew Lyton: Fortunately, you cannot hear it, really. There's,
like, a little bit of humming and, like, beeps and boops, you
know, like, of a normal old computer that's kind of running
in your house, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be,
which was also part of the requirement for me and my wife
is that we want this. We want our home to not feel like a data
center. Yeah. Yeah.
Big part of it. Exactly. In terms of location, it made the
most sense to put it in our living room mostly because
that's where our Wi Fi router router is. So
Audrey Evans: I love knowing painting the picture of of what
does this actually look and feel like to do something like this
in your actual home. And that you you see it, you interact
with it as an object constantly.
Drew Lyton: And not yeah. And to color that even more. So the
computer that is running all of our services that is sitting in
our living room, like, just chugging away twenty four seven
is also a thing that I use to, like, put my coffee on in the
morning when I'm sitting on the couch. Like, this is a real
piece of technology that exists almost as decor, as useful
furniture in in the physical realm as much as in the digital.
Audrey Evans: Is there, like, a particular day in the life of
hosting your own server that you that is an interesting day?
Drew Lyton: So in the day to day, I think that it's set up
well enough that I don't think about it. Like, I have image on
my phone and it looks I'm looking at it right now and it
looks identical to Google Photos. It's currently backing
up all the photos that I took, like, a few minutes ago. And so
in general, I think it's pretty hands off where on the non
normal days where I I do have to think about it, the day to day
experience is me going into the terminal, SSH ing into my
server, and reading logs of the, like, Docker files that are
running and trying to figure out why something broke, what went
wrong, looking at memory usage graphs, looking at CPU spikes,
trying to understand why randomly my graphics card
disconnected from the entire Linux container, you know. But
that stuff is pretty few and far between now.
It's both much more stable and much less stable than I think I
thought at the beginning, like in different ways.
Audrey Evans: Okay. Yeah. So how does this self hosted experience
feel compared to your rented cloud experience?
Drew Lyton: All in all, I think that these open source
alternatives provide a pretty good one to one to cloud based
options. A lot of them don't have as clean or as modern of a
UI as you might want. But things like image and jellyfin, I'd say
are as good, if not better, UI experiences. And a lot of that
has to do with the great work of the open source maintainers who
put in all of the effort to not only make these run well on a
lot of different types of hardware, but also put in a lot
of time and effort into making the experience a good one where
you would wouldn't miss the niceties of having a team of 400
people at Google who spend every waking moment trying to get you
to use Google Photos.
Audrey Evans: Right. Do you think this is a sustainable
choice for you and your wife and and your imminently to be born
new child.
Drew Lyton: Yeah.
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Have you learned anything about your
relationship through collaborating and working Oh. In
this way together?
Drew Lyton: I think we've definitely learned that we're
hoarders. Like, I I think the experience of having to have on
a hard drive in your home all of your important files, documents,
everything is both, like, exciting and also an
acknowledgment of, like, there are only so many resources and
do we really need this video that I shot when I was, like, 18
of me running home from from, like, getting groceries or
whatever. Like like, there is a lot of, I think, feelings of
less separation in terms of our relationship to, like, digital
files and goods being feeling more physical and having a cost,
which is, I think, something we didn't really think of before.
And also means we have to have conversations together about
similar to how you have to have conversations with your partner
about, like, we only have so much closet space, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe it's time for us to declutter. Like, you have to
have that now with your digital life Yeah. In a way that you
kind of don't when the the solution is just to throw more
money at the problem.
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Pay for
Drew Lyton: more storage.
Audrey Evans: Sometimes friction in relationship can surface
values and opportunities.
Drew Lyton: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And there are very new
conversations we're having about who is in charge of curating the
digital closet. A new chore that didn't exist before we had a
humming, you know, piece of furniture that stores all of our
digital life.
Audrey Evans: I love this. Well, maybe we'll have to do a part
two with your wife at some point. And the new baby and see
follow-up with you in six months and see how it's all going.
Drew Lyton: Yeah. There is a conversation we've been having
about how does this new, like, piece of furniture, this new
appliance, this tool we have affect, if at all, our kids'
relationship with a computer? And what does this new tool
enable us to do in terms of kind of curating and guiding their
experience through the early stages of learning about the
Internet, where we now have our own little Internet that is,
like, more safe. Right? And, like, private and controlled by
us.
And what does that enable us to do in terms of teaching and
learning about how to use these tools?
Audrey Evans: Did building your own cloud in your house, did it
feel like a radical act?
Drew Lyton: Building a home server and self hosting did feel
like a radical thing to do, mostly because I don't know
anyone else that's done it. And sometimes that makes you feel
like a pioneer. In this case, it made me feel slightly, like,
crazy. Like, there has to be a reason that I don't know anyone
else that is doing this. Yeah.
You know, not to spoil it too much, but there was something. I
was like, this was this was not a trivial thing to do. Yeah.
Audrey Evans: Why do you speculate you don't know anyone
else doing this?
Drew Lyton: I think there's a lot of reasons that people don't
self host ubiquitously. One of them is, for most people, it's
technically inaccessible. Convincing some people I know in
my life to build a computer would be very hard. To convince
them to build a computer that will run hypervisor software, to
run Linux containers with Docker, and have a VPN setup
with Tailscale, that seems impossible.
Audrey Evans: Even as a person who is wants to do all of those
things, the learning curve feels extreme.
Drew Lyton: Yeah. I I think so that that's a big part of it. I
think the technical inaccessibility is probably 80%
of why we don't see more people doing this. I think the other
20% is cost.
Audrey Evans: Okay. Say more.
Drew Lyton: It wasn't cheap to do this. And I did it on a
pretty low budget in comparison to some people in this
community. I bought a twelve year old decommissioned server
off of eBay for around $330 that had, like, a ton of RAM and a
relatively fine CPU. I spent close to, I think, $800 on hard
drives. Now you don't have to do that, but I did that because I
have a lot of video files that I wanted to store.
I bought stuff that you probably wouldn't ever need, like a
graphics card and an NVMe SSD, which is like a very fast hard
drive that you have in, like, your laptop and stuff. All like,
all in all, total cost. And obviously, like, I'm a tech
person and so I had a lot of this stuff lying around from
other projects. But even if you just take the base computer,
like investing $400 in something is not an like a no brainer
decision, especially when you're comparing it to the cost of a
hosted cloud solution, which costs $12 a month.
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Do you think that people should be doing
this? Like, in general, as a general approach to is this the
sort of way forward?
Drew Lyton: Mhmm. I think a world in which everyone is able
to self host all of their own versions of applications and
have, like, complete backups of their digital lives, own their
own data, all of these idealistic ways of using and
experiencing the Internet and making it personal. I think that
vision and that underlying emotion of, like, both freedom
and control totally vibe with me. That's why I did this thing.
And yet, I think that this is not something I would recommend
to most people nor is a future that I think I personally am
going to fight for.
And the reason is that I think that it creates a kind of
suburban Internet where alongside your lawnmower and
your car, you have a server that you have to maintain and take
care of. I think that that's a really inefficient use of
resources, is technically inaccessible for most people,
and gets rid of a lot of the great stuff about the cloud.
Audrey Evans: Yes.
Drew Lyton: The cloud is this, like, abstraction away from this
very complicated thing of figuring out how do I connect
myself to data and information and files that are backed up and
distributed and cached and all these things that make it super
fast and simple and easy to do. That infrastructure is really a
feat of engineering and is something that we really benefit
from and shouldn't be a requirement for everyone to try
to recreate for themselves. Yeah. I think, like, one of the
fundamental problems with this vision of a completely self
hosted future is that it assumes that isolated independent
systems are virtuous. But, really, isolated independent
systems are really inconvenient.
Like, self hosting is, yeah, like, personalized and private
and individual. But how then are we supposed to be able to have,
like, photo albums that are shared amongst you and me if
both of ours, like, the the amount of technological
infrastructure we would have to create and that I'm I know
people in this community are working on with, like, peer to
peer networking and distributed, like like, protocols, that all
seems cool. And, also, I think the easier and maybe more long
term beneficial approach is that rather than us all owning our
own clouds, we should just own the cloud.
Audrey Evans: Yeah. So that's my that's my exact question for you
is if we don't want to pay a corporate entity to, you know,
rent cloud storage and building our own personal cloud is maybe
not an option or even a desirable future as you've
listed out for us reasons why not. Could you talk us through
another vision of maybe building a communal shared Internet
infrastructure? What would a community hosted cloud look
like? How would it work?
What would need to happen for us to get there?
Drew Lyton: Yeah. I would love to imagine a world where along
with your library card like, when you register to get a
library card in your town, you also get access to, like, a 100
gigabytes of file storage and access to a, like, publicly
hosted, like, photo sharing platform, Google Drive
alternative, that that vision seems unattainable until you
realize that many corporations, nonprofit organizations,
schools, all already provide that to their constituents. This
idea that having some sort of public infrastructure to be able
to provide services on the Internet that are more web two
point o than web one point o, the idea that that's
inaccessible, I think is wrong. The same process that I went
through to set up a server in my house to have my wife and I be
able to back up our photos, access our media. This is the
same system that could be used amongst a community of people to
have one or multiple servers or even set up hosted solutions in
current data center infrastructure to be able to
provide that to thousands of people instead of two.
I don't think that that's crazy.
Audrey Evans: It's not. It's not crazy at all. And it might be
something that we need one day.
Drew Lyton: Yeah. And even so I wrote an article talking about
this experience, and someone reached out to me saying, hey. I
live in Arizona, and I'm doing this. I am building public
infrastructure for my town in Arizona and trying to work with
my local municipality and the library to make this not, like,
only marketed, but actually well established and sustainable. And
his experience was that the hard part is not the tech.
The hard part is convincing communities that the tech bros
could actually provide a good public service to them. There is
so much distrust around people that provide technology to us
right now that the notion that the tools that are currently
used by the lords to lord over us, the serfs, could be
accessible to them in a way that's co owned and cooperative
seems outlandish and, like, that it's got to be a scam.
Audrey Evans: And maybe that's the work that has to be done to
bring those communities into the process.
Drew Lyton: I think that that is totally the work to be done. It
is not we have solved the technical problems. The open
source community, the self hosted community, they've done
it. And now I think it is the work of us as technologists and
people that are passionate about providing this to our
communities to do the social work, to repair trust, and to
actually build connections and relationships that allow a more
community hosted and communal Internet to something that makes
you really feel empowered and connected to your community and
that this is co owned and shared.
Audrey Evans: I'm literally crying right now.
Drew Lyton: No. And that's all stuff that the Internet was
meant to be. Right? Like, this is the original vision of the
Internet. Yeah.
So there's just a lot of work to do.
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Are you suggesting we feel hopeful about
the Internet?
Drew Lyton: I don't know. With all of the wackadoo stuff
happening with AI and whether or not the Internet, you know, like
dead Internet theory and all this stuff, I do feel like it's
hard to have hope. But I really do believe in this, like,
counter cultural idea of the alive Internet theory where
these are places that we live and work. These are
fundamentally public social spaces. And we, for thousands of
years, have both struggled and figured out how to do public
spaces pretty well.
And it's just about leveraging all of that historical knowledge
and tapping into the people that already have that information to
make that happen, to make the Internet really feel alive and
like ours again.
Audrey Evans: Drew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
your This experience with was so much fun for me. I learned so
much. If people wanna find you online, where can they find you?
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So I can be found mostly only these days at
drewlighton.com. That's drewlyton.com. I post a
newsletter semi frequently with stories like this. So, yeah, if
people enjoyed hearing me talk about this, maybe you'll enjoy
reading words I've written about it.
Hans Buetow: Five. I'll throw five this time. That that way
you run out of rocks really quickly.
Whoo. Starting to lose feeling in my fingers.
That's awesome. And then if you're lucky, the ice, the sun
will heat up the rocks. The rocks will melt through the ice,
and you won't run into them when you're skating. Well, that was a
lot of fun. That's the secret of the lake.
Only one day of the year or only each time that it freezes,
freshly frozen, the same day that it freezes, it makes that
really resonant sound as you skip the rocks as they get
further and further out.
Amy: That sun is warm though.
Hans Buetow: It helps.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, December 10.
Never post is made each and every two weeks by a team of six
producers researching, writing, interviewing, editing, mixing,
and scoring, and designing their hearts out. If you appreciate
the work that we do and would like to help us continue to do
it, please consider becoming a member for $4, $4, or $4 a month
at neverpo.st today. Never Post's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name,
last name.
Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike
Rignetta. Trespasser, a high stone wall. I continue to
obsessively study improving your hurdle technique online. The red
curve of the track guiding from the right to the left of the
image as drills, mini disciplines are suggested over
and over.
I was young when I heard recounted to me the terror and
excitement of being chased off farmland, thinking there was a
gun scaling over to escape with superhuman force. Even then, I
wanted to be part of the chase. Excerpt of The Blank Jumped Over
the Blank Along a Line a Leap a Landing by Rowan Powell.
Neverpost is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
distributed by Radiotopia.