🆕 Never Post! Don’t Do It Yourself

Pals! Guess what? [long pause, like you're watching a show for toddlers] THAT'S RIGHT! A new Never Post on this fine Wednesday! This week, Audrey talks with cloud-server DIYer Drew Lyton about what its like trying to rebuild the internet in your living room. Also: LASERLAKE

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Intro Links

• Reservation of IPv6 Address Block 44::/16 for Amateur Radio Digital Communications (44Net)
• Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators
• iHeartRadio Exec Says Company Won’t ‘Play AI Music’ or Use ‘AI Generated Personalities’ in Staff Memo
• The Current No. 1 Christian Artist Has No Soul
• Forrest Frank on IG
• Poems Can Trick AI Into Helping You Make a Nuclear Weapon
• Dating algorithms? Investigating the reciprocal relationships between partner choice FOMO, decision fatigue, excessive swiping, and trust in algorithms on dating apps

Don’t Do It Yourself 

• Drew’s blog
• Drew’s website

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Tresspasser. 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, minidisciplines, are suggested. Over and over. I was young when I heard recounted to me the terror and excitement of being chased of farmland, thinking there was a gun, scaling over to escape with superhuman force. Even then, I wanted to be a part of the chase.

Excerpt of The [blank] jumped over the [blank] (along a line a leap a landing) by Rowan Powell

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

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.

How cold do you think it is right now? Seven degrees. Is that for real? It was seven earlier. It's probably warmer now.

It's probably eight.

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.

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.

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.

But this is where we started. Hi, Drew.

How's it going?

Going great. I want you to, if you could, tell us your name and who you are.

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.

Perfect. So I'm gonna drop us in here in a in a big picture question first. What is the cloud?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

And they can take it away at any time.

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.

How did this make you feel? What was your dominant emotion? Or there could be a palette of emotions here.

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.

So you are a highly technical person.

Mhmm.

What did you do?

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.

I love this. And I love I'm Is this a collaborative project between you and your wife?

This is so interesting.

How does that relationship work? Because it's a very specific kind of

Mhmm.

Technical choice you've made as a couple.

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.

I think we're ready for the technical.

Sure.

I think I'm ready to let it wash over me and enjoy it.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Beautiful. I'm so proud of you. I just met you, but I'm proud. I'm proud of

you. Thanks.

Do you remember the first time you turned it on and it worked?

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.

Beautiful. You'd be a great librarian.

I think I'm too disorganized. But

I don't think so. Not based on what I've heard so far.

Yeah. You're seeing the most pristine part of my office. So

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.

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.

Do you feel comfortable sharing what room you self host in?

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.

Can you hear it?

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

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.

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.

Is there, like, a particular day in the life of hosting your own server that you that is an interesting day?

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.

Okay. Yeah. So how does this self hosted experience feel compared to your rented cloud experience?

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.

Right. Do you think this is a sustainable choice for you and your wife and and your imminently to be born new child.

Yeah.

Yeah. Have you learned anything about your relationship through collaborating and working Oh. In this way together?

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.

Yeah. Exactly. Pay for

more storage.

Sometimes friction in relationship can surface values and opportunities.

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.

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.

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?

Did building your own cloud in your house, did it feel like a radical act?

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.

Why do you speculate you don't know anyone else doing this?

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.

Even as a person who is wants to do all of those things, the learning curve feels extreme.

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.

Okay. Say more.

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.

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?

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.

Yes.

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.

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?

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.

It's not. It's not crazy at all. And it might be something that we need one day.

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.

And maybe that's the work that has to be done to bring those communities into the process.

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.

I'm literally crying right now.

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.

Yeah. Are you suggesting we feel hopeful about the Internet?

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.

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?

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.

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.

That sun is warm though.

It helps.

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.

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