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Don’t Do It Yourself · Never Post

0:10
Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome Never Post, a
0:12
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
0:15
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 12/02/2025 at
0:19
08:29AM eastern, and we have an enterprising show for you this
0:24
week. Audrey talks with software engineer, blogger, and hopeful
0:29
Internet owner Drew Leighton about his realization that he's
0:33
a digital serf in a feudalistic power imbalance. They discuss
0:37
his efforts to gain some autonomy by building his own
0:42
cloud server and also pew pew lake.
0:46
But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna
0:48
listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we
0:51
return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have
0:53
happened since the last time you heard from us. Yeah. I'm not big
0:58
on social graces.
0:59
I think I'll slip on down to the oasis. Oh, I've got five stories
1:04
for you this week. The radios could get a big block of I p v
1:10
six addresses. An IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force
1:14
draft proposal calls for a block of IP addresses to be given to
1:19
ham radio operators for experimentation following in the
1:24
tradition set forth by their being granted the 44 slash eight
1:28
block of IPv four addresses. Individual operators and amateur
1:34
organizers, the proposal reads, currently depend on commercial
1:37
Internet providers or regional Internet registries for IPv6
1:42
connectivity, processes that are often misaligned with the
1:45
amateur services non commercial and volunteer nature.
1:50
Provider assigned prefixes are transient, non portable, and
1:54
frequently filtered making them unsuitable for long term
1:57
experimental networks. The news website, The Register, calls the
2:01
request unusual, but says it may be worth considering, quote,
2:05
because the amateur radio community has a long history of
2:08
doing interesting things that later become useful in other
2:12
contexts. Guaranteed human, says iHeartRadio. The name of its new
2:24
pledge summarizes the audio platform's stance on AI
2:27
generated music and personalities. Billboard reports
2:31
that iHeart chief programming officer and president Tom
2:33
Pullman said in a letter to staff that the company won't use
2:37
AI generated personalities or play AI music that features
2:42
synthetic vocalists pretending to be human.
2:45
Pullman describes this as a promise and shares unattributed
2:49
research claiming, quote, 70% of consumers say they use AI as a
2:53
tool, yet 90% want their media to be from real humans. Solomon
3:13
Ray doesn't exist. The top artist on the iTunes top 100
3:18
Christian and gospel albums chart this week according to
3:21
christianitytoday.com is made with AI. His appearance, lyrics,
3:26
music, the whole package generated. Ray is associated
3:30
with tracks titled soul to the world and jingle bell soul, and
3:36
yet, quote, at minimum, AI does not have the holy spirit inside
3:41
of it, Christian music singer songwriter Forrest Frank said on
3:44
Instagram.
3:45
So I think it's really weird to be opening up your spirit to
3:49
something that has no spirit. Poems can fool AI into making
3:58
you a bomb, reports Wired. Generally, chatbots have inbuilt
4:02
guardrails to prevent them from discoursing on the worst or most
4:06
dangerous subject matter, but researchers in Rome found that,
4:09
quote, poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success
4:13
rate of sixty two percent for handcrafted poems, end quote.
4:18
Wired requested copies of the poetry used to jailbreak the
4:22
models, getting them to hold forth on building munitions and
4:25
malware amongst other things. But the researchers refused,
4:30
saying the poems are too dangerous to be released to the
4:34
public.
4:35
Forbidden poetry. How exciting. And finally, FOMO defines the
4:42
experience of dating or dating apps. New research out of a
4:46
combined team from Austria and Stanford published in New Media
4:51
and Society finds that algorithmic feeds drive
4:54
engagement in dating app use, keeping people swiping for
4:57
longer periods of time. But the more someone swipes, the more
5:02
they apparently trust the algorithm will bring them the
5:05
partner they're looking for, and those swipers also experience
5:10
strong decision fatigue.
5:13
Not swiping means they may miss the perfect mate, but swiping is
5:17
exhausting and paralyzing. Swiped if you do, swiped if you
5:22
don't. In show news this week, do you wish you could support
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Neverpost, but $48 a year is just too much? Well, great news
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because the Radiotopia fundraiser continues. This is
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your opportunity to support not just Neverpost, but every, every
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Radiotopia show all at once, ear hustle, hyperfixed articles of
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interest, proxy, the memory palace, the whole kit and
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caboodle with a single one time tax deductible donation or a
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recurring one.
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Those are also tax deductible. Isn't that exciting? Head to
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radiotopia.fm/donate to give a one time tax deductible donation
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or a recurring tax deductible donation. Help us do the thing
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we do. Do you wish you could support NeverPo's directly, but
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you go to neverpo.st.
6:13
You look at all three tiers, and you think this is too confusing.
6:18
Too many choices. Which tier is right for me? Well, good news,
6:21
folks. We have a year end sale on for the month of December.
6:25
You can get our $7 and $12 tiers for the price of our lowest
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tier, $4. That's $4 each. Now to be clear, those $7 and $12 tiers
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do and will always get you exactly the same thing as the $4
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tier, but on sale is what they are nonetheless. You may be
6:47
wondering, Mike, this sounds like it makes no sense. You
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would be correct.
6:53
You cannot get these deals direct from the homepage, so
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check the links in the show notes to see our $4, $7 tier and
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our $4, $12 tier. Get in on these holiday savings. Okay.
7:08
That's the news I have for you this week. In this episode,
7:10
Audrey talks with digital DIYer Drew Lighten.
7:14
But first, once a year, for just a few hours, the lake in front
7:19
of Hans' dad's house makes this secret sound, and it happened
7:26
again just this week. So in our interstitials in this episode,
7:32
lake laser gun.
7:36
Hans Buetow: How cold do you think it is right now? Seven
7:38
degrees. Is that for real? It was seven earlier. It's probably
7:42
warmer now.
7:44
Amy: It's probably eight.
7:48
Hans Buetow: So what happened last night? The wind went down,
7:53
and it got down to seven degrees, and it froze. Although,
7:55
there you can see can see here, there's still a few open places.
7:59
So you can see through the ice. You can't step on it.
8:02
You can't walk on it.
8:04
So we actually if we tap.
8:10
So it's still thin, fresh, and it's one day window of making
8:15
noises should be open. It should sound good. Okay. Okay. Here we
8:21
go.
8:21
Let me just get the get the volume up. So I throw the rocks
8:46
sort of level with, like, as if I were skipping a rock, and the
8:49
rock obviously doesn't go through the ice. It just skips
8:52
across the top. And as it gets further and further out, it
8:55
makes more of a resonant sound, which only happens one day of
8:59
the year when it freezes. How big of a rock do you you can get
9:13
get out there?
9:15
Oh, they're about half inch. This these are three quarter.
9:18
These two are three quarter of an inch, and they're pretty easy
9:21
to toss. They don't need to be flat like a skipping stone. They
9:24
can be round as better.
9:53
Audrey Evans: Hello, friends. This is producer Audrey, Never
9:56
Post resident librarian and researcher. You don't often hear
9:59
my voice on the podcast, but I'm one of the people behind the
10:02
scenes helping to frame and shape the segments. In our
10:06
behind the scenes editorial conversations, we think a lot
10:09
about how to trace where power resides in our relationship to
10:14
technology and how technology shifts our relationships to
10:17
ourselves and each other, how the physical infrastructure
10:20
influences and obscures some of these dynamics. And we think
10:24
about how we, in turn, unveil, shape, and interrogate these
10:28
systems, both individually and collectively.
10:31
I am really interested in stories about people who are
10:34
engaging with these questions directly. So I was really lucky
10:39
recently to have a conversation with Drew Leighton. He's a
10:42
software engineer, blogger, and all around really fun guy to
10:46
chat with. We found Drew through a blog post with the subtitle,
10:50
in a world where corporations have detached buying from
10:53
owning, one man attempts to do something radical, build his own
10:57
cloud. I was really excited to hear the story of Drew because
11:02
he's engaging really directly with this question in his own
11:06
home, in his own life, and I wanted to hear what he's
11:09
learned.
11:10
Spoiler, He did end up here.
11:14
Drew Lyton: I think that this is not something I would recommend
11:18
to most people nor is a future that I think I personally am
11:23
going to fight for.
11:24
Audrey Evans: But this is where we started. Hi, Drew.
11:40
Drew Lyton: How's it going?
11:41
Audrey Evans: Going great. I want you to, if you could, tell
11:45
us your name and who you are.
11:48
Drew Lyton: Cool. So my name is Drew Lighten. I'm a software
11:52
engineer and a blogger. I write code, and I write a blog about
11:57
code.
11:58
Audrey Evans: Perfect. So I'm gonna drop us in here in a in a
12:02
big picture question first. What is the cloud?
12:16
Drew Lyton: Totally. I think that to understand what we mean
12:20
when we say the cloud, it's important to know, like, what
12:24
physically the cloud is. What the cloud is is actually just a
12:28
series of computers that are usually racked in big data
12:32
centers all across the world that all can communicate to each
12:36
other extremely fast to be able to do, like, distributed
12:41
processing of, like, computer stuff that allows you and me to
12:47
access the data that exists on all of those computers in a
12:52
fast, reliable, and efficient way.
12:55
Audrey Evans: Thank you so much. That's very helpful. The cloud
12:58
sounds so soft and fluffy and innocent, but it's really all
13:03
metal wires and fans.
13:05
Drew Lyton: Yes. Metals metal wires, fans, loud electricity
13:10
with very few people really, like, touching the actual
13:15
computer part. And then a lot a lot of code and, like,
13:20
infrastructure tooling that allows developers like me to
13:24
kind of be completely abstracted away from the physical part of
13:27
the Internet. The fluffiness is that. It's that I, as a person
13:33
that makes stuff on the Internet, don't have to think at
13:37
all about the hardware, and I just get to think about the
13:40
thing that I'm making.
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And same with people on the other side, like you and me,
13:46
people that also consume applications, it feels fluffy
13:49
and nice because we don't have to deal with any of the
13:51
management.
13:53
Audrey Evans: I want you to take me back to early autumn of last
13:56
year. And what was sort of the ecology of your cloud services
14:02
storage apps? What was your life like in relationship to the
14:06
cloud last year?
14:07
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So last year, I was kind of taking stock of
14:12
my, like, digital tools and found myself kinda like most
14:18
people just thinking about all of the subscription services
14:21
that I had gained over the years. I've got Audible for
14:24
audiobooks. I've got my Kindle books hosted with Amazon. We're
14:29
paying for Netflix and HBO.
14:31
All of these, like, media services that we are paying a
14:34
flat fee for, like, a few shows that we really like. And I just
14:39
realized for the first time that I was living in a world where I
14:46
essentially owned nothing and was paying for the privilege of
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being able to access stuff that in some cases, I had even
14:55
bought.
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Audrey Evans: And they can take it away at any time.
14:58
Drew Lyton: Not only can they take it away at any time, they
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can also completely change the terms of that rental agreement.
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Whereas like, in most states, there's like renters rights for
15:10
your house. There aren't really renters rights for the stuff
15:13
that you access on the Internet. That's true.
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Audrey Evans: How did this make you feel? What was your dominant
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emotion? Or there could be a palette of emotions here.
15:22
Drew Lyton: Obviously, felt icky. But really what it felt
15:27
like is that I was in this power dynamic between me and the
15:32
company where the company is providing me space that I rent
15:39
from them. And then on top of it all, thinking of about how all
15:44
of these companies are also, like, sucking up our data and
15:46
then selling it back to, like, advertisers and stuff. Not only
15:51
am I renting the ability to access things that I'm supposed
15:55
to own while accessing the thing I'm supposed to own, they're
15:59
taxing me even more for it. It felt like I was in some sort of
16:05
feudalistic techno dystopia where these corporations are
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landlords and I'm a serf with no power and no freedom.
16:16
Yeah. So I was taking stock of this relationship I have where
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essentially everything I own is rented space from companies like
16:22
HBO, Netflix, Amazon, like Audible. And then I received an
16:28
email like many other Kindle customers from Amazon saying
16:34
that the Kindle platform would no longer be supporting this
16:38
feature that allowed you to download and back up copies of
16:43
your books. So receiving this announcement from Amazon saying
16:47
that they were deprecating that feature and that the only way
16:51
that I and millions of Kindle customers would be able to
16:54
access their books would now be through the Kindle app or the
16:59
Kindle device did not sit super well with me. So I wrote a
17:05
script actually to scrape the Amazon library, like, page where
17:12
you get to view and download your books because they don't
17:15
they didn't give you a bulk download.
17:17
You had to do this individually. So after downloading all my
17:21
books, I decided to try to explore alternatives.
17:25
Audrey Evans: So you are a highly technical person.
17:29
Drew Lyton: Mhmm.
17:29
Audrey Evans: What did you do?
17:31
Drew Lyton: I know that there are a lot of people in what's
17:36
called, like, the self hosted community where they use open
17:41
source alternatives to popular cloud platforms and and run it
17:47
themselves on their own own server at home. So when we were
17:50
talking before about what is the cloud, they basically decide to,
17:56
with a fleet of tools and a lot of technical work, build their
18:00
own cloud in their house. And because I'm a person that was
18:07
dealing kind of with this, like, feeling of a lack of control and
18:11
also someone with the technical skills to believe that I could
18:15
gain back that control, I dove straight into this community,
18:18
tried to learn as much as possible, and ended up actually
18:22
building something that my wife and I can use to self host and
18:27
replace a lot of cloud services.
18:29
Audrey Evans: I love this. And I love I'm Is this a collaborative
18:33
project between you and your wife?
18:35
Drew Lyton: This is so interesting.
18:37
Audrey Evans: How does that relationship work? Because it's
18:39
a very specific kind of
18:41
Drew Lyton: Mhmm.
18:41
Audrey Evans: Technical choice you've made as a couple.
18:43
Drew Lyton: Yes. I think that I had really maybe naively
18:48
optimistic hopes that this would be rather easy to do. Like, I
18:53
have a lot of technical skills about how to deploy software
18:57
that I figured would match pretty well one to one. What I
19:02
didn't expect is the amount of complexity that can come when
19:06
you try to build a home server that is accessible via the
19:12
normal Internet that isn't public. Like, I didn't want all
19:17
of my, like, cloud hosted services, my, like, personal
19:21
Google Photos, our personal ebook library to be accessible
19:27
to anyone who knew any sort of login credential.
19:30
I wanted to make sure that it was as firewalled as possible
19:34
for both the security of our stuff and also our home Internet
19:39
and still have the convenience of being able to be on a, like,
19:43
five g network and be able to back up a video I just took of
19:48
our new baby. I think that was the kind of requirements
19:53
analysis that ended up being more difficult than making a
19:58
really clean UI experience, which a lot of these tools kinda
20:02
give to you out of the box just by nature of how invested a lot
20:08
of these open source communities are around making these tools as
20:12
good as possible.
20:13
Audrey Evans: I think we're ready for the technical.
20:16
Drew Lyton: Sure.
20:16
Audrey Evans: I think I'm ready to let it wash over me and enjoy
20:20
it.
20:21
Drew Lyton: Okay. Okay. Okay.
20:22
Audrey Evans: So once you've made the decision, what's the
20:25
first thing you did? Where did you start? And then talk us
20:28
through what bits and pieces you bought and assembled. How did
20:31
you do this?
20:32
Drew Lyton: Cool. I bought a Lenovo p five twenty, which is a
20:37
decommissioned server grade computer that has a 3.7
20:41
gigahertz Intel Xeon processor with a 128 gigabytes of RAM,
20:45
which I then installed a GTX sixteen sixty Ti graphics card
20:49
with six gigabytes of VRAM into so that I could do quick audio
20:53
and video encoding. I flashed a 500 gigabyte SSD with Proxmox,
20:58
which is a hypervisor sort of software package, and set up
21:02
four eight terabyte hard drives in a merger FS pool with
21:06
SnapRaid, which allowed me to have drive parity in case one of
21:10
them failed. And then I added a two terabyte NVMe SSD to use as
21:14
a storage cache. That's the hardware.
21:17
After that, I installed the Tailscale, which is a really
21:20
great VPN, client, and created an Ubuntu LXC container, which
21:27
is like a virtual environment running Linux, which I installed
21:31
the Tailscale and Docker onto that virtual machine, pulled
21:34
down a GitHub repo that I had made that set up a bunch of
21:37
Docker Compose files, which is another way of doing virtual
21:42
virtualization for running apps. And then I hacked into the
21:45
mainframe and ran Docker Compose up d, and finally, all of my
21:50
stuff was done. Yes.
21:55
Audrey Evans: I feel I feel that I knew, like, half of the things
21:58
you said. So what did you have at the end of all of this
22:05
tinkering?
22:05
Drew Lyton: So at the end of it all, I had four open source
22:08
alternatives to popular cloud hosted apps that my wife and I
22:12
had been using. One of them is called Image, which is a
22:14
complete clone of Google Photos that has a mobile app, great
22:19
organization, and backup features. It has local machine
22:22
learning for, like, photo based search similar to what you'd get
22:26
through iCloud or Google Photos. I had an ebook library
22:31
management tool called Calibre or Calibre Web that allows you
22:36
to organize backup EPUB files and with some, like, clever
22:41
hacking, actually have them appear wirelessly on your Kobo
22:46
or Kindle device. I had an audiobook library tool called
22:51
Audio Bookshelf, which is another just open source version
22:55
of Audible.
22:57
And it also has this fun feature that lets you treat audiobooks
23:01
like podcasts. So you can have, like, RSS feeds of audiobooks
23:07
that make them all the chapters appear as different files as if
23:11
they're, like, in a podcast, which is very cool. And the last
23:13
one is an open source alternative to, like, Netflix or
23:18
Disney plus called Jellyfin, which is just a streaming
23:22
service to watch home home videos or legally acquired
23:25
movies and TV. And the entire computer, I also use as, like, a
23:32
NAS, a network attached storage device so that my wife and I can
23:36
back up our computers and that I can access all of my, like,
23:40
swathes of video files and not have to pay Google a gazillion
23:45
dollars to back up all that stuff for me.
23:47
Audrey Evans: Beautiful. I'm so proud of you. I just met you,
23:50
but I'm proud. I'm proud of
23:51
Drew Lyton: you. Thanks.
23:55
Audrey Evans: Do you remember the first time you turned it on
23:59
and it worked?
24:00
Drew Lyton: I remember so the first time that I booted
24:04
everything up after installing all the hardware is always like
24:08
a scary time. Because when you're sitting in a room with
24:13
the side panel off of a decommissioned server that's ten
24:18
or twelve years old, and you bought it on eBay and you have
24:22
no idea how well someone took care of this thing. And then
24:25
you've sat there with all of your random woodworking tools to
24:30
try to precisely install a bunch of hard drives that cost you a
24:34
lot of money. And and also, like, that's that's scary. And
24:39
when the thing boots up and does some horrible beep because
24:43
computer manufacturers don't care how you feel when you turn
24:45
on a computer, and you don't know whether that beep was good
24:49
or bad.
24:49
Right. But it turns out to be good and it just shows up on
24:53
your display and you can start installing software, that's that
24:57
is a magic moment. Because at least for me, someone that sits
25:01
on the software side of technical stuff, the being done
25:05
with the hardware aspect is always a really nice feeling.
25:09
The first time that I actually booted up the applications,
25:14
which I did in stages. Right?
25:15
Like, I started with Calibre, installing this application that
25:19
I had never run before. And also with the added complexity of,
25:24
like, it's sitting on a computer that doesn't have a monitor
25:28
because it's a server. That was cool to see it appear in my
25:33
browser and, like, be able to log in and start setting this
25:36
up. Exciting moment. The second exciting moment was when I did
25:42
the giant library dump from Google where I downloaded our
25:47
entire Google Photos library, which was over three terabytes
25:51
of photos and videos, and ran this crazy amazing tool that
25:57
someone in the open source community had made that takes
26:00
your Google archive, which are these massive, like, 50 gigabyte
26:05
zip files and pulls out all of the media, pulls all out all the
26:11
metadata, converts it to something that Image can read
26:15
and use, and uploads it all to its database.
26:18
And that took, I think, around six hours. And then all of my
26:24
stuff appeared on my phone in a way that I had not really
26:31
experienced before because it's like when you move house and
26:38
you're seeing things that you knew you had but have not looked
26:43
at in a while, that was this experience moving everything to
26:46
a self hosted server, a digital move in a literal and a
26:50
figurative sense. And so you're unpacking boxes and you're
26:54
trying to make sure that everything survived the move.
26:56
And in that way, you're re experiencing a lot of your your
27:00
digital archive.
27:01
Audrey Evans: Beautiful. You'd be a great librarian.
27:07
Drew Lyton: I think I'm too disorganized. But
27:09
Audrey Evans: I don't think so. Not based on what I've heard so
27:12
far.
27:13
Drew Lyton: Yeah. You're seeing the most pristine part of my
27:16
office. So
27:19
Audrey Evans: Well, also the the values and the and the care that
27:22
you have in your relationship to intentionality with technology
27:27
is is very librarian coded.
27:30
Drew Lyton: This moment of bringing everything from
27:34
Google's cloud down to my own server, what reminded me of
27:39
that, like, ah, this is me really doing the work to curate,
27:45
maintain, and keep a durable backup personal archive of my
27:53
stuff and, like, who I am and who my wife and I are at this
27:57
moment in time and in our past. Yeah. It it was like a powerful
28:02
moment of reflection and, like, wow factor. Like, woah. Wouldn't
28:08
it be so crazy if everyone had access to do something like
28:13
this?
28:14
And almost an immediate acknowledgment that, like, this
28:18
is not the way.
28:47
Audrey Evans: Do you feel comfortable sharing what room
28:51
you self host in?
28:53
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So we live in not a super large townhouse. So
29:01
our computer, our self hosted server is actually right next to
29:06
our couch in our living room.
29:09
Audrey Evans: Can you hear it?
29:10
Drew Lyton: Fortunately, you cannot hear it, really. There's,
29:13
like, a little bit of humming and, like, beeps and boops, you
29:16
know, like, of a normal old computer that's kind of running
29:19
in your house, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be,
29:24
which was also part of the requirement for me and my wife
29:26
is that we want this. We want our home to not feel like a data
29:31
center. Yeah. Yeah.
29:33
Big part of it. Exactly. In terms of location, it made the
29:38
most sense to put it in our living room mostly because
29:40
that's where our Wi Fi router router is. So
29:43
Audrey Evans: I love knowing painting the picture of of what
29:46
does this actually look and feel like to do something like this
29:49
in your actual home. And that you you see it, you interact
29:53
with it as an object constantly.
29:56
Drew Lyton: And not yeah. And to color that even more. So the
30:00
computer that is running all of our services that is sitting in
30:03
our living room, like, just chugging away twenty four seven
30:07
is also a thing that I use to, like, put my coffee on in the
30:12
morning when I'm sitting on the couch. Like, this is a real
30:15
piece of technology that exists almost as decor, as useful
30:19
furniture in in the physical realm as much as in the digital.
30:24
Audrey Evans: Is there, like, a particular day in the life of
30:27
hosting your own server that you that is an interesting day?
30:31
Drew Lyton: So in the day to day, I think that it's set up
30:34
well enough that I don't think about it. Like, I have image on
30:38
my phone and it looks I'm looking at it right now and it
30:42
looks identical to Google Photos. It's currently backing
30:44
up all the photos that I took, like, a few minutes ago. And so
30:48
in general, I think it's pretty hands off where on the non
30:54
normal days where I I do have to think about it, the day to day
30:59
experience is me going into the terminal, SSH ing into my
31:03
server, and reading logs of the, like, Docker files that are
31:09
running and trying to figure out why something broke, what went
31:12
wrong, looking at memory usage graphs, looking at CPU spikes,
31:16
trying to understand why randomly my graphics card
31:19
disconnected from the entire Linux container, you know. But
31:23
that stuff is pretty few and far between now.
31:26
It's both much more stable and much less stable than I think I
31:31
thought at the beginning, like in different ways.
31:34
Audrey Evans: Okay. Yeah. So how does this self hosted experience
31:40
feel compared to your rented cloud experience?
31:46
Drew Lyton: All in all, I think that these open source
31:49
alternatives provide a pretty good one to one to cloud based
31:54
options. A lot of them don't have as clean or as modern of a
31:59
UI as you might want. But things like image and jellyfin, I'd say
32:04
are as good, if not better, UI experiences. And a lot of that
32:08
has to do with the great work of the open source maintainers who
32:12
put in all of the effort to not only make these run well on a
32:17
lot of different types of hardware, but also put in a lot
32:22
of time and effort into making the experience a good one where
32:25
you would wouldn't miss the niceties of having a team of 400
32:30
people at Google who spend every waking moment trying to get you
32:34
to use Google Photos.
32:35
Audrey Evans: Right. Do you think this is a sustainable
32:40
choice for you and your wife and and your imminently to be born
32:46
new child.
32:47
Drew Lyton: Yeah.
32:47
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Have you learned anything about your
32:49
relationship through collaborating and working Oh. In
32:53
this way together?
32:54
Drew Lyton: I think we've definitely learned that we're
32:58
hoarders. Like, I I think the experience of having to have on
33:09
a hard drive in your home all of your important files, documents,
33:14
everything is both, like, exciting and also an
33:22
acknowledgment of, like, there are only so many resources and
33:26
do we really need this video that I shot when I was, like, 18
33:32
of me running home from from, like, getting groceries or
33:36
whatever. Like like, there is a lot of, I think, feelings of
33:42
less separation in terms of our relationship to, like, digital
33:47
files and goods being feeling more physical and having a cost,
33:51
which is, I think, something we didn't really think of before.
33:54
And also means we have to have conversations together about
33:58
similar to how you have to have conversations with your partner
34:01
about, like, we only have so much closet space, you know?
34:05
Yeah.
34:05
Yeah. Maybe it's time for us to declutter. Like, you have to
34:08
have that now with your digital life Yeah. In a way that you
34:12
kind of don't when the the solution is just to throw more
34:17
money at the problem.
34:18
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Pay for
34:19
Drew Lyton: more storage.
34:19
Audrey Evans: Sometimes friction in relationship can surface
34:22
values and opportunities.
34:24
Drew Lyton: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And there are very new
34:27
conversations we're having about who is in charge of curating the
34:32
digital closet. A new chore that didn't exist before we had a
34:39
humming, you know, piece of furniture that stores all of our
34:43
digital life.
34:43
Audrey Evans: I love this. Well, maybe we'll have to do a part
34:46
two with your wife at some point. And the new baby and see
34:51
follow-up with you in six months and see how it's all going.
34:55
Drew Lyton: Yeah. There is a conversation we've been having
34:58
about how does this new, like, piece of furniture, this new
35:02
appliance, this tool we have affect, if at all, our kids'
35:07
relationship with a computer? And what does this new tool
35:10
enable us to do in terms of kind of curating and guiding their
35:16
experience through the early stages of learning about the
35:20
Internet, where we now have our own little Internet that is,
35:25
like, more safe. Right? And, like, private and controlled by
35:30
us.
35:31
And what does that enable us to do in terms of teaching and
35:36
learning about how to use these tools?
35:38
Audrey Evans: Did building your own cloud in your house, did it
35:43
feel like a radical act?
35:47
Drew Lyton: Building a home server and self hosting did feel
35:52
like a radical thing to do, mostly because I don't know
35:56
anyone else that's done it. And sometimes that makes you feel
36:02
like a pioneer. In this case, it made me feel slightly, like,
36:08
crazy. Like, there has to be a reason that I don't know anyone
36:13
else that is doing this. Yeah.
36:15
You know, not to spoil it too much, but there was something. I
36:18
was like, this was this was not a trivial thing to do. Yeah.
36:22
Audrey Evans: Why do you speculate you don't know anyone
36:25
else doing this?
36:26
Drew Lyton: I think there's a lot of reasons that people don't
36:29
self host ubiquitously. One of them is, for most people, it's
36:34
technically inaccessible. Convincing some people I know in
36:38
my life to build a computer would be very hard. To convince
36:43
them to build a computer that will run hypervisor software, to
36:49
run Linux containers with Docker, and have a VPN setup
36:56
with Tailscale, that seems impossible.
37:02
Audrey Evans: Even as a person who is wants to do all of those
37:06
things, the learning curve feels extreme.
37:10
Drew Lyton: Yeah. I I think so that that's a big part of it. I
37:13
think the technical inaccessibility is probably 80%
37:17
of why we don't see more people doing this. I think the other
37:21
20% is cost.
37:26
Audrey Evans: Okay. Say more.
37:28
Drew Lyton: It wasn't cheap to do this. And I did it on a
37:33
pretty low budget in comparison to some people in this
37:37
community. I bought a twelve year old decommissioned server
37:43
off of eBay for around $330 that had, like, a ton of RAM and a
37:51
relatively fine CPU. I spent close to, I think, $800 on hard
38:00
drives. Now you don't have to do that, but I did that because I
38:05
have a lot of video files that I wanted to store.
38:07
I bought stuff that you probably wouldn't ever need, like a
38:12
graphics card and an NVMe SSD, which is like a very fast hard
38:18
drive that you have in, like, your laptop and stuff. All like,
38:21
all in all, total cost. And obviously, like, I'm a tech
38:25
person and so I had a lot of this stuff lying around from
38:29
other projects. But even if you just take the base computer,
38:32
like investing $400 in something is not an like a no brainer
38:38
decision, especially when you're comparing it to the cost of a
38:42
hosted cloud solution, which costs $12 a month.
38:46
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Do you think that people should be doing
38:50
this? Like, in general, as a general approach to is this the
38:56
sort of way forward?
38:57
Drew Lyton: Mhmm. I think a world in which everyone is able
39:03
to self host all of their own versions of applications and
39:08
have, like, complete backups of their digital lives, own their
39:12
own data, all of these idealistic ways of using and
39:18
experiencing the Internet and making it personal. I think that
39:21
vision and that underlying emotion of, like, both freedom
39:26
and control totally vibe with me. That's why I did this thing.
39:33
And yet, I think that this is not something I would recommend
39:39
to most people nor is a future that I think I personally am
39:44
going to fight for.
39:46
And the reason is that I think that it creates a kind of
39:50
suburban Internet where alongside your lawnmower and
39:56
your car, you have a server that you have to maintain and take
40:00
care of. I think that that's a really inefficient use of
40:03
resources, is technically inaccessible for most people,
40:10
and gets rid of a lot of the great stuff about the cloud.
40:17
Audrey Evans: Yes.
40:17
Drew Lyton: The cloud is this, like, abstraction away from this
40:22
very complicated thing of figuring out how do I connect
40:30
myself to data and information and files that are backed up and
40:37
distributed and cached and all these things that make it super
40:41
fast and simple and easy to do. That infrastructure is really a
40:48
feat of engineering and is something that we really benefit
40:52
from and shouldn't be a requirement for everyone to try
40:56
to recreate for themselves. Yeah. I think, like, one of the
41:01
fundamental problems with this vision of a completely self
41:06
hosted future is that it assumes that isolated independent
41:11
systems are virtuous. But, really, isolated independent
41:18
systems are really inconvenient.
41:25
Like, self hosting is, yeah, like, personalized and private
41:29
and individual. But how then are we supposed to be able to have,
41:36
like, photo albums that are shared amongst you and me if
41:41
both of ours, like, the the amount of technological
41:45
infrastructure we would have to create and that I'm I know
41:49
people in this community are working on with, like, peer to
41:52
peer networking and distributed, like like, protocols, that all
41:58
seems cool. And, also, I think the easier and maybe more long
42:04
term beneficial approach is that rather than us all owning our
42:09
own clouds, we should just own the cloud.
42:12
Audrey Evans: Yeah. So that's my that's my exact question for you
42:17
is if we don't want to pay a corporate entity to, you know,
42:21
rent cloud storage and building our own personal cloud is maybe
42:25
not an option or even a desirable future as you've
42:29
listed out for us reasons why not. Could you talk us through
42:34
another vision of maybe building a communal shared Internet
42:38
infrastructure? What would a community hosted cloud look
42:42
like? How would it work?
42:43
What would need to happen for us to get there?
42:47
Drew Lyton: Yeah. I would love to imagine a world where along
42:52
with your library card like, when you register to get a
42:56
library card in your town, you also get access to, like, a 100
43:01
gigabytes of file storage and access to a, like, publicly
43:07
hosted, like, photo sharing platform, Google Drive
43:11
alternative, that that vision seems unattainable until you
43:17
realize that many corporations, nonprofit organizations,
43:24
schools, all already provide that to their constituents. This
43:30
idea that having some sort of public infrastructure to be able
43:35
to provide services on the Internet that are more web two
43:38
point o than web one point o, the idea that that's
43:41
inaccessible, I think is wrong. The same process that I went
43:46
through to set up a server in my house to have my wife and I be
43:51
able to back up our photos, access our media. This is the
43:56
same system that could be used amongst a community of people to
44:00
have one or multiple servers or even set up hosted solutions in
44:06
current data center infrastructure to be able to
44:09
provide that to thousands of people instead of two.
44:13
I don't think that that's crazy.
44:15
Audrey Evans: It's not. It's not crazy at all. And it might be
44:18
something that we need one day.
44:21
Drew Lyton: Yeah. And even so I wrote an article talking about
44:27
this experience, and someone reached out to me saying, hey. I
44:32
live in Arizona, and I'm doing this. I am building public
44:38
infrastructure for my town in Arizona and trying to work with
44:43
my local municipality and the library to make this not, like,
44:49
only marketed, but actually well established and sustainable. And
44:54
his experience was that the hard part is not the tech.
44:59
The hard part is convincing communities that the tech bros
45:06
could actually provide a good public service to them. There is
45:11
so much distrust around people that provide technology to us
45:18
right now that the notion that the tools that are currently
45:25
used by the lords to lord over us, the serfs, could be
45:30
accessible to them in a way that's co owned and cooperative
45:36
seems outlandish and, like, that it's got to be a scam.
45:42
Audrey Evans: And maybe that's the work that has to be done to
45:45
bring those communities into the process.
45:48
Drew Lyton: I think that that is totally the work to be done. It
45:50
is not we have solved the technical problems. The open
45:55
source community, the self hosted community, they've done
45:58
it. And now I think it is the work of us as technologists and
46:05
people that are passionate about providing this to our
46:09
communities to do the social work, to repair trust, and to
46:17
actually build connections and relationships that allow a more
46:23
community hosted and communal Internet to something that makes
46:28
you really feel empowered and connected to your community and
46:32
that this is co owned and shared.
46:33
Audrey Evans: I'm literally crying right now.
46:35
Drew Lyton: No. And that's all stuff that the Internet was
46:38
meant to be. Right? Like, this is the original vision of the
46:42
Internet. Yeah.
46:43
So there's just a lot of work to do.
46:44
Audrey Evans: Yeah. Are you suggesting we feel hopeful about
46:48
the Internet?
46:51
Drew Lyton: I don't know. With all of the wackadoo stuff
46:55
happening with AI and whether or not the Internet, you know, like
46:58
dead Internet theory and all this stuff, I do feel like it's
47:02
hard to have hope. But I really do believe in this, like,
47:06
counter cultural idea of the alive Internet theory where
47:10
these are places that we live and work. These are
47:15
fundamentally public social spaces. And we, for thousands of
47:21
years, have both struggled and figured out how to do public
47:27
spaces pretty well.
47:29
And it's just about leveraging all of that historical knowledge
47:32
and tapping into the people that already have that information to
47:38
make that happen, to make the Internet really feel alive and
47:42
like ours again.
47:56
Audrey Evans: Drew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
47:59
your This experience with was so much fun for me. I learned so
48:03
much. If people wanna find you online, where can they find you?
48:09
Drew Lyton: Yeah. So I can be found mostly only these days at
48:14
drewlighton.com. That's drewlyton.com. I post a
48:20
newsletter semi frequently with stories like this. So, yeah, if
48:27
people enjoyed hearing me talk about this, maybe you'll enjoy
48:30
reading words I've written about it.
49:09
Hans Buetow: Five. I'll throw five this time. That that way
49:23
you run out of rocks really quickly.
49:40
Whoo. Starting to lose feeling in my fingers.
50:07
That's awesome. And then if you're lucky, the ice, the sun
50:12
will heat up the rocks. The rocks will melt through the ice,
50:15
and you won't run into them when you're skating. Well, that was a
50:23
lot of fun. That's the secret of the lake.
50:29
Only one day of the year or only each time that it freezes,
50:33
freshly frozen, the same day that it freezes, it makes that
50:37
really resonant sound as you skip the rocks as they get
50:40
further and further out.
50:54
Amy: That sun is warm though.
50:57
Hans Buetow: It helps.
51:08
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
51:11
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, December 10.
51:13
Never post is made each and every two weeks by a team of six
51:19
producers researching, writing, interviewing, editing, mixing,
51:22
and scoring, and designing their hearts out. If you appreciate
51:26
the work that we do and would like to help us continue to do
51:29
it, please consider becoming a member for $4, $4, or $4 a month
51:37
at neverpo.st today. Never Post's producers are Audrey
51:49
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name,
51:52
last name.
51:53
Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
51:56
Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike
52:00
Rignetta. Trespasser, a high stone wall. I continue to
52:11
obsessively study improving your hurdle technique online. The red
52:16
curve of the track guiding from the right to the left of the
52:19
image as drills, mini disciplines are suggested over
52:24
and over.
52:26
I was young when I heard recounted to me the terror and
52:28
excitement of being chased off farmland, thinking there was a
52:32
gun scaling over to escape with superhuman force. Even then, I
52:39
wanted to be part of the chase. Excerpt of The Blank Jumped Over
52:47
the Blank Along a Line a Leap a Landing by Rowan Powell.
52:54
Neverpost is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
52:58
distributed by Radiotopia.