An impossible journey into self-hosting

Today on the flagship podcast of network-attached storage: This is the fourth in our four-part series all about connectivity. This week we're talking about software: how software connects us, how we connect to software, and how software connects to other software. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:33David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of network-attached storage. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the fourth in our four-part series all about connectivity. Over the last few weeks, we've dug into the ways we connect to content, to each other, and to audiences. And this week, I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about software. How software connects us, how we connect to software, and how software connects to other software. And that story, at least for our purposes today, starts with a computer I bought a little while ago. I bought it on Amazon with essentially no research, but I bought it. It's called the B-Link Mini PC. It has 12th-generation Intel chips, 16 gigs of RAM, 500 gigs of SSD storage. It's a fine little computer. And it's just this little box of a thing,

• 1:15David Pierce?

  about the size of like two of the boxes the iPhone comes in. It's pretty small, and I just hid it immediately off in the corner of my desk. I bought this thing because I wanted to test a theory. That theory is that maybe self-hosting is the future of technology. Over the last two decades, really, we've been on this race toward cloud software, in which all of the apps and platforms and data you use are stored not on your computer, but on a server somewhere in a Google or Amazon or Microsoft warehouse. There are a lot of good reasons for that shift. There are a lot of good things about cloud software. And there are also a lot of reasons to think cloud software is not going anywhere anytime soon. Here is Peter Van Hardenberg, who works at a research lab called Incan Switch, explaining the upsides, I think, pretty well.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  The idea of the cloud was that, hey, it turns out that actually shipping software onto people's computers is a huge pain in the neck. It's out of date. You can't fix it if it breaks. You have no idea what's happening. There's all these problems. And I think the biggest thing, just from like a brass test, tax perspective, is not a technical problem. It was like an onboarding problem. Cloud software gets users easier.

• 2:23David Pierce?

  We're going to come back to Peter in a minute. I promise. But cloud software, for all the things it makes easier and more useful, also has lots of downsides. It doesn't work offline, for one thing, because it's not really on your device at all. Also, if that software's developer goes away or pivots to something else, or just decides not to deal with you anymore, the software you rely on can just disappear. The cloud software world is convenient and great, but it's just fragile and it is so fundamentally not yours. So, like I said, I had this theory that self-hosting might be the answer. At least for important stuff, I figured maybe I should stop relying on cloud services and instead build a system that lets me access my own stuff from anywhere through tools that I control.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  So I bought this B-Link and started setting stuff up. It went poorly. The main thing I discovered is that self-hosting is hard. I'm not the world's most technically capable person, but I know my way around a computer and still I could barely get things up and running. If you want to like set up a Plex server so you can get it your movie collection from anywhere, that's pretty easy. But at least in my experience so far, there's essentially nothing else out there that is that easy. One great guide I found is from an author and entrepreneur named Derek Sivers, who created a really handy step-by-step system for registering a domain, setting up your own cloud storage and routing everything from files to email to your calendar, all to that system. He calls this guide "tech independence", which I really like, and it is really useful.

• 3:52David Pierce?

  You can get through it without knowing a ton going in, but it is so much work. And it requires a lot of technical sophistication, just in the sense of you have to know what terminal is and how to open it and what to type in and just time and energy. It's just a lot. I won't lie to you, I bailed about Halfway through the process, I ran into a thing with the FTP server and just gave up. One tool I did manage to set up is called Image. It's a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. I was thinking about it at the beginning of this process and realized that if all my cloud stuff were to disappear tomorrow, the photos I lost would be the worst part. So I wanted to switch them over to something that wouldn't go away. And Image is actually a great tool.

• 4:34David Pierce?

  It has a nice mobile app, it has lots of features, it's a pretty passable Google Photos replacement. But by the time I downloaded Docker and was worrying about virtual machines and containers, it was eating all the memory on my computer, I was just back to feeling totally over my head. I did eventually get it working, but I can't imagine most people are gonna wanna do all of that work. Image was created by this guy named Alex Tran, and I kept wondering how he felt about the setup process. So I called him up and asked him. He told me that he started working on Image in the first place because his wife wanted a tool like Google Photos, but didn't wanna pay for Google Photos, which as far as I'm concerned is like an extremely universal opinion on the internet. So he set out to build something that was self-hosted and easy, and he found nothing.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  So when I first started Image, I used Image as the opportunity for me to learn about, you know, how to build nice software, how to build good software. So I structured it in a way of using Docker. Using Docker is actually coming from the idea from the community on the self-hosted subreddit that everything should be running from Docker because of the ease of development and maintenance. At the time, I didn't have a lot of experience with Docker, so it's nice, it's perfect for me to learn how to build a Docker image, how to put that into a deployable way. So I put everything into Docker Compose. And at first, there were a bunch of settings that you have to do before

• 6:02Speaker 03

  running the Docker Compose up command to bring up the whole application. And over time, that has been simplified, and now we basically move all of the, anything that you can configure through the command, through the environment variable, now you can do it directly inside Image. So it's cut out that initial configuration, to the point now that the only thing that you need to change when you're setting up a new Image server is the location where you want to store the file. And then you just do Docker Compose up, and then it would run.

• 6:35David Pierce?

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

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it has gone through a lot of improvement and for sure, this is coming from the team that has experience with a lot of deployment. So I'm really thankful for them to help me learn.

• 6:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's awesome. But do you think just the fact that it requires Docker kind of immediately rules out most people? Like, I don't think I'm gonna convince my wife to like even know what Docker is in order to set up a photo server, right? Is that just kind of the the cost of doing software this way? Like, is there a world in which all of this can be made simpler and easier over time and start to feel like, you know, you can install and set up a server, just like installing and setting up another app?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are a lot of requests for that. But from my point of view, when you are doing something, especially for self-hosting, right? And now when it comes to your really important data, like photo, the person who managed the server should have some technical knowledge about managing the server. I think this is a something that a self-hosting person should learn is to how to use Docker. Because now, when you go into the awesome self-hosted GitHub repository, most of the application you see can be run from Docker. Because it's

• 8:09Speaker 03

  just make the development easier, more mainstream, and also the deployment easier and more mainstream. For example, you can deploy it on Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora the same way without worry about which package should be compatible with my distro or with this version. Everything is just just work from the containerization standpoint.

• 8:35David Pierce?

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

• 9:15Speaker 03

  The recent sentiment is that a lot more people are starting to concern more about their privacy with all the story that about the third party or the services that you use can access your data. So more and more people are starting to be noticing that. And I think the more people start noticing that, then they will start to find a way to get back that control of the data. And it would be a good drive to get people to look into self-hosting more. But of course, this is a very technical field, right? You would need to have some IT knowledge, some computer knowledge,

• 9:58Speaker 03

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

• 10:29David Pierce?

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

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're always looking for a way to make it simpler. But as of right now, I think with the limitation of the tool that we have, and the tool that we have access to, in order to serve, to fulfill the purpose of high performance, easy to maintain, right now, I don't see a tool better than Docker. Unless we have some invention down the road in this space that compete with Docker, and to make things even more streamlined and easier, that would be really cool thing to have. But as of right now, I don't see the alternative. If you do know anything, please let me know.

• 11:39David Pierce?

  By the time I'd finished talking to Alex, I'd sort of given up on the idea that self-hosting can be a mainstream solution for people who want more ownership and control of their stuff. Seriously, just the fact that Docker, an app that's all about containerized application development, might become a mainstream thing that people know how to use, just seems wrong to me. I just don't think that's gonna happen. I don't think it's necessarily impossible to make self-hosted systems that are user-friendly and simple. I think Plex is actually a really good example of how to do it right. But there's just not much else out there that qualifies right now. But as I was asking around, trying to figure out what might work if self-hosting doesn't, I heard about this concept that a few people mentioned to me. It's called "local-first software." And when we come back from a quick break, we're gonna talk

• 12:24David Pierce?

  about why local-first software might just be the best of both worlds. We'll be right back.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 13:06David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Okay, local-first software. Let's go back 40 years or so to the early days of the computer era. Computers were huge and boxes and beige and made by a bunch of companies that mostly don't exist anymore. Back then, cloud services weren't a thing. Nobody was running all their software on servers anywhere because none of that existed. People acquired software by like going to a store and buying a box that had a disk of some kind in it that you plugged into your computer to install a program. That all sounds sort of quaint now? Like, can you imagine getting in the car and driving to Target every time you wanted to get a new app on your phone? Hard pass. It's all much better now. But that approach did have one really nice side effect. Your software was yours.

• 13:49David Pierce?

  It was installed on your computer, locally. If the company that made your game went out of business, you might not get updates, but your game would still run fine on your computer. If the developer of your productivity app made some horrible UI change you hate, no problem, just don't buy the next version. That's how software worked for a long, long time. One way to think about it is that our computers used to be the home for our software, and now they're just the way that we access software that lives somewhere else. That difference feels small, but it actually totally changes the way we think about what our devices actually do. Which brings us back to Peter from before. Remember the cloud services guy from Ink and Switch? He is a big believer and promoter of the idea of local-first software, which he thinks

• 14:32David Pierce?

  can combine the best of all of the last four decades of software. Basically, in a local-first world, your apps live on your device, just like they did 40 years ago. They are yours, your software belongs to you and you can access them offline or without worrying that they'll still be around tomorrow. But you can also connect that software to the cloud and get all of the collaboration and multi-device sync. And in general, the convenience benefits of having it in the cloud. This sounds like the best of both worlds, right? This is how it should all work, I think. So I called up Peter to ask him how it works, why he's such a big believer in the idea and why software didn't turn out that way in the first place. He started by telling me a story about a music app that I certainly had not thought about in a long time. And I bet you haven't either. It's called Audio.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Audio was a great piece of software, but the offline mode for the Audio app was like a whole other program from the main app. It had different features, it behaved in different ways, it had different bugs. And I just remember this feeling of like, why was the song I just listened to? And the playlist I was just looking at, where did they go when I went into offline mode? Because I had them here. And so in a sense, what was happening is that this app was deleting my data, right? And like, there's a more sophisticated, like, I'm a developer. These are my friends who built this app, have worked on this stuff. I know the real answer is more complicated, which is that like, you know, the kind of normal way of building apps in this era is that you have a server, which is where the software really lives.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  And the thing that you hold on your, in your hand, or the thing that you have on your computer in front of you, that's not really the program. That's just like a mask in front of the program and it talks to the program on your behalf. And it presents like a pretend version of the program that's what you use. I had this feeling of like, especially though if you have an offline mode, then you need to have the program. Cause you can't talk to the program when there's no internet.

• 16:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  But it's crazy because everybody's building like this sophisticated program, they're running it in the cloud. And then on the mobile app in the device for offline mode, they run smaller, worse versions of it. They don't actually work the same way. And I was just like, how about this? How about we write the program, we run it on our computers and then we talk to the cloud to get the data. And then we have the data in our computers, whether they're in our pockets or on our laptops or whatever. Cause like, when you go in an airplane or in a taxi or take muni and your computer just turns into a paperweight, that sucks. And not only that, but like, I was a huge fan of Audio. I know a lot of people who loved Audio. You can't use it anymore.

• 17:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  You can't use it anymore because you never had it. I can still run Winamp. I can go and download Winamp and I can run Winamp today. I can find all those sweet skins from the 1990s. I can use Winamp. But audio is gone forever. And as I got deeper into this stuff, the more I started to think about that. And the more I realized that like, not only is this just an inconvenience for me, it's, it's a disappointment. Right. Like RIP Google Reader or whatever your favorite cloud software that's gone. But like, we are in a dark age of software. And I mean that, not in like the sense that the software is bad. What I mean is that every piece of software that runs today, that's built the way we build software. Everything we built on Heroku, where we used, I used to work.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  All that stuff is going to disappear irrevocably soon. And everything that we've built and everything that we've done in this era, all of our collective communal work will be lost.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  The thing you're describing though, where it sort of matches the best of those two things, this idea of local first software. How did we not get to that sooner? That, that seems like anyone sort of looking at this for a long time should have thought, what if I had the app on my device? Like audio is such an interesting example, right? Like the people at audio, did they just not think someday this will all be gone? Wouldn't it be nice? Like this is one of the things I go back and forth with, with all this software is I understand all the reasons it's easier to build cloud first software and that it's more, you make more money doing it. That, that all makes sense. But, but part of me wonders like, is the reason just that people don't care about the flip side?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  I don't think that's it. I think there are a few elements here, but a lot of it comes, there's two things. There's a technical challenge and there's a narrative dimension.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  The narrative dimension is that, you know, everybody wants to build the next big startup and make a billion dollars. Venture capitalists are telling everybody that's how to build software. Everybody thinks that they have to build for Google scale. They're going to need Cassandra, they're going to have a billion users, they're going to be, you know, it's the sins of rocket ship. You know, just hop on. And like, when you approach building software with this mindset, then you reach for the tools that other people who have done this task. Have used. And so a big part of it as well is that like, you know, there's like a, the term is path dependence, right? Like, we started making cloud software and we're like, oh, this is great. And then we just kept piling more and more energy onto that, trying to solve the problems of it.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And there was very little investment on this other axis. You know, there was like the offline first movement, which I think, you know, is a closely related precursor. But like, the narrative has been like, well, why do you want that? The cloud solves all our problems, right? Like, internet is everywhere. You've got wifi at home. You've got wifi. You make a hotspot with your phone. Everyone's got internet all the time. What's the big deal? Just wait, it'll be there. And so first, that's not true. I mean, there is internet more and more places. But the other thing is this kind of like, the consequences of the cloud took a long time to become clear. Right? When we started working on Heroku, you know, and back in the day, there wasn't killed by Google dot com.

• 20:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  We didn't have a history of apps that had come and gone, and now we're lost. Because we hadn't had time to go through that sort of generational cycle. So I think a lot of the problems have, you know, as so often is the case, have emerged over time, right? If you look at the oil era, nobody was like, hey, this awesome energy source might turn out to have some consequences someday. People are like, this is amazing. I can go see my aunts and I don't have to like, feed a horse to get there.

• 20:30David Pierce?

  That's very fair. And it does seem like, you know, you mentioned the narrative side and the technological side. And it does seem like with sort of the, I don't know, manifesto of local first software, you did try to get at both of those. Cause I think one of the questions I came into this with was like, to what extent is the kind of heady case for data ownership? And longevity and the idea of like, having a space on the internet that's mine. How far does that really get you? And I feel like you do make some of that case. And I'm curious how broadly effective you think that case can be. But then there is also like, at some point, you just have to build better products. And I feel like one thing I liked about the way you guys approached it is you also make the case that this is a way to make better products.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think these kinds of philosophical perspectives will motivate a certain audience. But I think that when you make the right thing, the easy thing, people will do it. It's as simple as that. If it's cheaper and easier to build software local first, then people will do it. And so what we do is we just focus on that problem, which is, you know, we care about some of these things. And we know there are people who care about some of these things, and that's great. And there are like people with privacy concerns, like activists and so on. But like, I think when you look at those narrow niche markets, those audiences, they're great people with real problems. And it's great to be able to help people who have those problems. But like, we all want software that works.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  We all hate when the thing doesn't go, when the keystrokes are too slow, and you hit submit and you get a spinner like. And if we can just make it easier to build software in a way where that just doesn't happen or happens less, then I think everybody will be happy. So just make the right thing the easy thing. You were saying, oh, earlier, like, is it harder to build software this way? It's impossible to build software the way we build software. It's costs a fortune to build software the way we build software. You need to learn Kubernetes. There's like literally like 200 three-letter acronym services that constitute Amazon Web Services. And then on top of that, you have to learn, go multi-cloud and learn how to do it on Google and Microsoft as well. It's impossible to build software today, the way we build software.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  It's like, you wanna like go to the grocery store and you gotta use all the technology to build an aircraft carrier to get there. What we need is bicycles, right? But all we're building is aircraft carriers. And this is like the Jonathan Edwards line, right? We were promised bicycles for the mine, but we got aircraft carriers instead. It's so complicated to build anything in the cloud. And then on top of that, once you do, you figure out your GraphQL and whether you use Postgres or Mongo and like what front-end framework? And Node or Go on the backend? And do you need to use Ops Zero? Do you need to use this? You need like all these cloud services, you put it all together, you get the damn thing running. And now you gotta pay every month to keep the thing online. And when anything falls over, you get paged in the middle of the night, woken up.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  It's impossible to build software. And if you do, you're gonna regret it because it's gonna cost you a fortune to wake you up.

• 23:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, and most of the pieces of that equation you have absolutely no control over. Like, I'm reminded of this every time AWS goes down. And it's like, oh, the internet dies whenever AWS has an issue. Like fundamentally, we rely on Amazon to keep its data centers up to like live our lives. And that's bonkers.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also hilarious is just that like we've so totally broken the internet as this like mesh network that literally if you and I were in the same room recording this call, all of our data would probably be bouncing off of US East One in Ashburn, Virginia, and back to each other's laptops just so that we could collaborate. It's wild. I think there's a bunch of other interesting problems. I mean, like, there's interesting challenges around like, you know, the networking stuff, right? It's called a browser, not a keeper. All this app that I'm looking at right now as we're talking, when I close and open the tab, it's not going to be saved. I can't come back to this work. And the browser really assumes that you're just kind of grazing as you use your computer. But it's become the main platform for software.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  And so then there's Electron, which is like a wrapper around a browser with a bunch of bells and whistles. But like, all this stuff feels kind of unsatisfying. And I think, you know, it's tough when like the incentives of the organization that builds the most important piece of software on your computer are to sell you ads. Like, the platform we all live every day in is run by an ad company. And, you know, lots of great people at Google, they care about these problems. But like, there's just an incentive structure here that's not favorable for solving these problems.

• 25:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  And so there's some of that dimension. But I think in terms of like value and priority, I think one thing that we are really interested in at Incan Switch is what we call malleable software after Philip Chernovsky's PhD. And this is this idea that like, we live in this weird world where like, computers again, are meant to be this like very powerful compositional informational environment. But increasingly, like, all of the software we use are these like closed boxes that are given to you by somebody else and you can't do anything with, you know? And so I like to think Of the ideal computing environment as being like a wood shop or a kitchen. Like in my kitchen, I can make Indian food or Japanese food. I can go and like reheat some leftovers.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  And like I have not too many kitchen gadgets, but like you can go a long way with a chef's knife and a cutting board. And like, you know, a stand mixer.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  You know, it's measuring spoons, but you can do a lot with like a few good elements. But like the software world is very much like, you know, oh, this note taking that you can't open the notes from that note taking app. And so I think a lot about like, once we have local first software, for us, this is really just the first step. Right? If the software is local first and you have the software, then just like if you bring shelving home from Ikea. You know, you can decide whether or not you want to put all the shelves in, or if you want to set it up on its side or upright. If you want to cut the legs off the chairs because you're short. You know, you want to paint it a different color to match your space. We're really interested in this problem of like, once we have the software, can we start to actually use it? Can we make it our own? As we see the local first movement start to build steam, we see so many people getting involved.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Our vision is starting to look forward to like the next frontier, which is actually empowering users to not have to care about these things, but to be able to care about these things. Right? And in your home, if you have a challenge, you might go to the hardware store and buy the things and fix it for yourself. Or you might hire a handyman. Or maybe you live in an apartment and you call your super.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Right? But whatever that relationship you have to that space is, it's something that you can have agency and make choices about. And we think that all computing environments should have those properties and we want to start figuring out how to bring that next to the broader world and that's kind of where we think about where this goes after we start to see local first software kick off.

• 27:27David Pierce?

  This is all kind of heady, I know. But the app that I was thinking about that helped me understand the idea is this note taking app called Obsidian. You might've used it. It's pretty popular. It's a great app. Big fan. Obsidian is above all just an app you download to your computer that reads and writes text files. If you boil it all the way down, that's what it is. The company offers a service for syncing your files, but that's a separate thing. And if Obsidian goes out of business, you can always Always sync through Google Drive or Dropbox or lots of other things. And Obsidian is built on a plugin system. So the main app is really basic, but you can add all kinds of functionality just by downloading a bit of code or even writing some yourself. If Obsidian ever goes away, you'll still have the app. If a plugin ever disappears, you'll still have the version that you installed.

• 28:10David Pierce?

  And if for some reason way down the road, the app ever stops working entirely, you'll still have your folder of text files because that's all it is anyway. And you can just take them somewhere else. Obsidian, the company, is building new tools for sharing and publishing and lots of other stuff. Because again, the cloud is a good thing. There are lots of upsides, but you don't have to use any of them. And if Obsidian goes away, you'll still have Obsidian. That is local first software right there. I love it. All right, we have to take one more break and then we have one more big idea about software to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called in me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 29:17David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. As I was working on this episode and trying to figure out what it means to take back some control of our software and our devices, I was also reading a new book called The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow. If you've never heard of Cory, he's an activist and author and blogger. And he's been thinking about the way that the internet should work for a really long time. And this book is basically a step by step guide for how to take down the tech giants. He argues, as he often does, that the internet is run by a few huge companies. That's a problem and we should stop it. Most of that is a conversation for another day. And I don't agree with all of Cory's thoughts on the subject, but it's a really good book. It's really interesting and worth reading. The thing that jumped out at me most about it was Cory's specific idea for how Improve our tech situation.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  He doesn't argue for breaking up the tech giants or reinventing capitalism altogether, though I suspect he'd be cool with both of those things. He actually makes the case that interoperability, different apps and platforms being compatible with one another, is pretty close to a one-stop fix for everything. Ever since I read the book, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that idea, that maybe instead of going back to having all my data only on my device or only using software that works offline, the solution is just to make it so easy to move between services that a few of them going away wouldn't make a difference. I guess like if the whole internet goes down, you're still in trouble, but we're in big trouble anyway if the internet goes down. Anyway, I wanted to understand why Corey thought interop was the answer, like the answer.

• 30:47David Pierce?

  So I called him up to figure it out.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  The biggest picture thing you talk about is interoperability. And the idea that what we should do is by hook or by crook, open all these platforms to each other and to others. And then I think if I'm not misunderstanding this, web standards are the fastest way to get there, right? Like I've, I feel like I've spent the last year or so talking to people and betting on the idea that like the open web can be the solution to a lot of our platform problems, if only we allowed it to be. You're, you're making a face. Tell me what you think.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  So I would say it's not quite web standards are how we get there. Cause first of all, web standards are mandatory. So we've all seen very versions of embrace and extend. So I would say that there has to be a two-pronged approach. One is rules about what you must do. So we might say to Facebook, you have to open up a gateway. And that might be through legislation, but it might be through a settlement, right? Like Facebook and Twitter and all these other companies, they're just incapable of coloring within the lines. They're just like pathological cheaters. And so they're all already under multiple FTC consent decrees and European Commission consent decrees and whatever. And they're all violating them and they're all eventually going to be dragged into a situation where they're going to seek a settlement. And so we might as a settlement say, oh, you have to stand up these gateways.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  But like in theory, the, the EU's legislation about interoperability between messaging apps, that's the kind of thing you're talking about.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. And the Digital Markets Act, it's not just messaging apps. It's a whole bunch of. Of different platforms, they're just starting with messaging, which we can talk about this later, I think is a mistake. They should be starting with social media messaging. If they screw it up is gonna like expose dissidents and other people to leaks in their messaging. Yeah. It's like the next Jamal Khashoggi who's murdered the way Jamal Khashoggi was by someone exploiting a defect in the instant messaging tools that he uses to lure him to his death. Is going to discredit this whole project. It's a huge mistake, but it's not just those mandates, right? Like, because that's going to roll out over 10 years. In the, in parallel, there's like Facebook violating its consent decree, Google just violating its consent decree.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  Twitter violating all of these other rules, you know, and they're gonna, in parallel with this, someone might just say like, okay, well, if you wanna not be fined 10x your market cap. And live to fight another day, you're gonna have to consent to standing up this interoperable gateway. Twitter is gonna have to offer a activity pub gateway or something, right? And the problem with that is it's very hard to administer that remedy. And we're getting into some wonky sort of public administration stuff here, but like, say, we say to Facebook, you have to stand up a gateway to activity pub. So people can leave, go to a Mastodon server, but still be connected to the people that matter to them and the customers and the communities and all the things that they're sort of glued to Facebook by.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  But then Facebook shuts down that gateway and says, we shut it down because we thought there was another Cambridge Analytica that was stealing a billion users data. Which is a thing that actual future Cambridge Analytica's are gonna try to do, right? Sure. They're gonna try to exploit this API. We just saw, you know, 23andMe gets scraped for however many million Ashkenazi's genetic records. And it's just like, as an Ashkenazi person, a very creepy sentence to say, you know? And so we're gonna want them to like have an intrusion detection system and a firewall and security engineers. But how do you distinguish the pretext from the reality, right? When, when Facebook says, oh, we're shutting this down once a week because we're worried about Vols and active attacks.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  When everybody understands Facebook's infrastructure is to a first approximation of Facebook employee. And you're like deposing these people and spending like years arguing about whether This was a pretext or not. In the meantime, the new market entrance, these Mastodon servers or whatever it is that have stood up to like welcome in Facebook refugees that were evacuating from Facebook, those users are learning that they can't rely on them. The financiers, the banks or the individuals who funded them are learning that you shouldn't fund these projects and the people who started them are learning that it's not a fruitful thing to do with their time. It's a waste of their time. So you also need to re-legalize the stuff that Facebook did to MySpace.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  So when Facebook started, everybody was MySpace user and they didn't just say, hey, come hang out on Facebook. We have a better user interface. Eventually, your friends might show up and in the meantime, you could admire our great color choices. They said like, here's a bot. Give it your login. Give it your password. It'll go to MySpace several times a day, impersonate you, login, scrape your inbox, put it in your Facebook inbox, let you autopilot your responses back out to Facebook, to MySpace. So you can eat your cake and have it too. So what if we re-legalize that conduct? Because you know, when people try to do that to Facebook like Power Ventures did, or OG App, or other tools that have popped up to do this to Facebook, Facebook just sues them into like radioactive rubble, right? Computer Fraud Abuse Act, DMC 1201, tortious interference

• 35:36Speaker 05

  with contract, patent, trademark, copyright, all these other kind of this thicket of what we call IP, but which is like the right to control the conduct of your customers, critics and competitors. And so, you know, if we re-legalize that conduct, then those new market entrants who Facebook locks out of their API could fall back to scraping bots, reverse engineering and other tools. Now, that's guerrilla warfare with Facebook. In general, I think Facebook will lose that over the long run because for Facebook to just successfully defend this, they need to make zero mistakes and to successfully attack their defenses, you need to find one mistake. And so that will privilege them. But I also think Facebook would, all other things being

• 36:19Speaker 05

  equal, prefer a managed solution where the API is reliable to a situation where they cannot use the law to stop these adversarial interoperators because guerrilla warfare represents

• 36:31Speaker 05

  Unquantifiable risk to Facebook and shareholders do not like surprises. And we saw Facebook lose a quarter of a trillion dollars after their first report of 2022 to their shareholders when they revealed that they it wasn't even contraction, it was less growth than they'd anticipated among US users. And the people who bore the brunt of that stock crash were the managers who made the decisions that led to the reduction in users, right? Because they're the ones whose portfolios are primarily stuffed with Facebook stock, right? More than anyone else, they're the least diverse shareholders, right? And so if we say to Facebook, to the decision makers at Facebook, if you break your API, you will have to contend with guerrilla warfare.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  And that guerrilla warfare will produce the surprises that will make you personally significantly poorer. Then I think we align their incentives, but of course, no one ever lost money by betting on the hubris of tech executives. So if they do go ahead and do this, then we have a fallback. That's what I mean by like an administratable remedy, right? An actual plan that looks at what Facebook is doing that harms people, what stops people from getting out of harm's way, what will moderate those harms? And what we'll do when Facebook takes a countermeasure to recover its supernormal profits at the expense of everyday users and how we will counter that.

• 37:54David Pierce?

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

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Are you an Evernote casualty?

• 38:03David Pierce?

  Oh, yes. And this is kind of, this is actually where I was going is one of the first things you do if you build a note taking app is you build an Evernote importer. Because there are a lot of people who have hated Evernote because it's been very bad for 10 years who are stuck there because they have thousands of notes and they want to leave. And Evernote makes you makes you export in this like .e n e x file that is proprietary, but also everyone else has figured out how to manage it. And so I can now with two clicks pull all of my Evernote notes into some other app, which has made it possible to leave Evernote for tons and tons of people who otherwise would not have been allowed out. And what it is in social is like I'm stuck in Evernote for the rest of my life. Because it is so hard to switch that I will put up with whatever nonsense there is

• 38:46David Pierce?

  just to be here. And like, the note taking is such a smaller version of it, but is like, that's how it should work.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  That's a great example, because one of the reasons that that's true is that Evernote started late, or started early. If Evernote had started later, when they were, when they were better developed, more reliable, and more widely understood strategies for blocking that reverse engineering. You know, if they, if they were encrypting those databases, then bypassing the encryption would be unlawful. If you could only access those databases through an app that blocked scraping and autopiloting, then they could use terms of service violations to stop you from running something locally that just iterated through every note you had and then spit it out, right? So like, it shows you that while mandates are important, right? We, we could, if Evernote were large enough and, and enough of a hazard,

• 39:34Speaker 05

  you could imagine a future in which Evernote was legally required to offer you an export tool. But you don't actually need it some of the time. Some of the time, rival firms can just work this out. And that's what Apple did with, with Microsoft Office, you know, they, they, I was, I tell the story in the book. I was a freelance CIO, running, you know, the networks for all these small and medium companies. And a typical company would have a 20 people with Windows PCs and a designer with a Mac. And if you tried to send that designer a Word file, an Excel file, or an Office file, and they tried to open it in my Mac Office, it would either not work, or then after they made changes and saved it, it would be corrupt, or, you know, some variation. All you had to do was like wave the Mac Office floppy around,

• 40:18Speaker 05

  and files would spontaneously corrupt. And I just started like, first I put PCs on those designers' desks that they used as dedicated office workstations. And then when that became unwieldy, I put big graphics cards in their PCs and got them Quark and Adobe for, for their PC and threw away their Mac. And Apple figured out this was happening, and so they just got engineers to reverse engineer Office. And so we get iWork Suite, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, that reads and writes the Microsoft Office files. And then the really interesting thing is what Microsoft did. Because after a Few rounds of aggressively changing those file formats and incurring their own engineering expenses, because then they have to update all their own Windows software. They sued for peace and they standardized the Office file formats,

• 41:03Speaker 05

  which is why we have the X at the end of the XLSX and PPTX and DOCX, which stands for XML. And this is why you can now paste styled text between Word, Google Docs, web forms. You know, Medium has a parser for it, right? Like if you're composing on Medium, I bet your CMS does. I know The Verge has got its own CMS that you guys built from scratch, but you probably just imported like a reference library for parsing out those things. So you can compose in Word or Docs and it just works.

• 41:32David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  And so like at a certain point, when you have to use engineers to block interoperability instead of lawyers, then you just give up because lawyers solve the problem forever, right? Lawyers teach every financier, every entrepreneur and every user, don't trust interoperable solutions. Engineers, they have to fight and fight and fight. And eventually they lose in these wars of attrition. And so, once you take away the lawyers, the companies sue for peace.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  At least as far as I can tell, like Mastodon and sort of what the whole Activity Pub world represents is like the closest extant thing to the kind of interoperability that you're talking about.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and Activity Pub came out of the W3C at the same time as all this bad standardization was happening. And the reason that this good standard emerged without being interfered with, I think, is that the big tech companies didn't believe it would matter enough to sabotage it. It wasn't like they couldn't, it's just that they chose not to. And they could have submarined all kinds of proprietary advantages and so on into it. And they just didn't. And as a result, we got this thing that just kind of snuck in under the radar because no one thought it was important. It's a bit like what happened with the web itself, right? Where like nobody took the web seriously enough. When the web came along, the fight was between AOL and CompuServe. And just like nobody took it seriously enough.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  So Tim Berners-Lee was able to make a thing that Microsoft didn't. Extinguish the way they were going after rival online services. And then by the time the web took off enough, they tried afterwards, right? It became a success and Microsoft tried all these variations. You know, if you remember, there was a time when MSN meant something new every six months. Cause they would relaunch MSN as some proprietary thing that was like the web, but not the web. It was Blackbird at one time, all this stuff where they were just trying to lure people into locking into a proprietary technology stack to extinguish the web. And like, it just snuck in under the radar. Nobody was paying attention to it. And then all of a sudden it was there and it was like too big to kill. And, you know, I think that Activity Pub kind of fits that, that window.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  It just snuck in when no one was looking.

• 43:43David Pierce?

  What do you make of the fact that like Adam Mosseri is constantly saying that Threads, which is not currently federated, very much a closed platform, is going to be part of it? Like, is that a, is that a company sea change? Or is that just a guy saying the right thing at the right moment?

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Well, I, I think that even people of good will can talk themselves into doing bad things. Like, let's stipulate that Mosseri is completely sincere, right? But in two years, there's 400 million daily users of Threads. And they just rationalize that opening those users up to federation would expose them to risks that Facebook is currently able to defend them from, that they have the, you know, moderation tools and the other things that are needed to prevent disinformation, harassment and so on. And that federating will expose new risks to those users. And it's just unfair to those users.

• 44:38David Pierce?

  Which to some extent is not untrue.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Sure, particularly if you have a bunch of users who become accustomed to certain practices that don't take account of the risks, but also the benefits of federation. And so you just drop them into the deep end. And so the way that you protect your future weak self is for your present day strong self to do something that is irrevocable in that service. So like, we call these Ulysses pacts, right? Ulysses in the, in the tail, he's a hacker. He doesn't want to fill his ears with wax when they sail through the sea of the Sirens to prevent their calls from luring him to his death in the sea. He wants to hear them. So in this moment of strength, before he's hearing the sirens call, he has the sailors lash him to the mast and says, whatever I do, don't untie me.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  So that I can live through this, I can experience the benefits of my strength, even in a moment of weakness. And we've all done versions of this, right? You throw away the Oreos the night you go on a diet. Right? That's a form of Ulysses pact. Open source licenses are a form of Ulysses pact because they're all irrevocable. Right? Every time an IP lawyer who hasn't, who isn't familiar with open source first encounters on open or a free license like the GPL or even the BSD license, whatever, they go like, oh, this is, this is dumb. They, everyone must have missed this. This should have a way for you to revoke the license later and if you change your mind. And that is not a bug, it's a feature. Because when your investors come to you and say, well, this was cute.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  But if you want the 150 people you convinced to quit their jobs and put their kids' college funds on the line to come work for you to have a job next week, you're going to make this open source proprietary next week. And you can just say like, you're the boss, but I can't, like, I just can't. And so you're, for Facebook to say, well, someday this will be open, trust us. Given the company's track record is bananas, right? Because Facebook in 2006, their pitch to MySpace users was like, you love your friends, but did you know that the evil, crapulent Australian billionaire who owns MySpace, Rupert Murdoch spies on you with every hour that God sends? Facebook is the service that will never spy on you. That was their pitch in 2006, right?

• 46:45Speaker 05

  We're the surveillance free social media platform and we always will be. And in 2008, they polled their users and said, we're going to start spying on you. Is this okay with you? And they said, no. And they did it anyway, right? So like, as George Bush taught us, right? Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again. Right? And, and you know what would be a more compelling thing than promising to federate? Federating, right? And if they're not federated, then all it is is a latent capability. And like, computers are Turing complete Universal von Neumann machines. So every capability is latent in every service. Right? Like unless there's some means by which users can discipline executives who take

• 47:27Speaker 05

  bad choices, then we should expect those executives to fall prey to the same folly and rationalization that all of us are capable of.

• 47:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think it sounds like you're of the mind of there are sort of two approaches. One is to essentially mandate that threads federates like put into law that if you have to have Activity Pub. The other one is blow open enough holes or make it legal for people to blow open holes in such a way that someone else will do it for them. And there's nothing that threads can do about it.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  I think this is more like two-part epoxy, right? Adversarial interoperability, the right to reverse engineer and stuff. At EFF, we call this comcom competitive compatibility because adversarial interoperability is so hard to say.

• 48:09David Pierce?

  Comcom is very good.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, comcom is great. So comcom is great, but it is unstable, right? Because you are finding a blind spot in the intrusion detection system or the anti-automation stuff, and you're exploiting it and you're making it work.

• 48:22David Pierce?

  You're playing a cat and mouse game with thousands of engineers designed to stop you.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, they have to make no mistakes. You have to find one mistake. You can stockpile 20 vulnerabilities and roll them out one after another as they plug one and then the other. There are lots of ways that this will be advantageous, but it is unstable. You know, in the days when Mint started, you know, they were scraping like 6,000 different bank websites. And if the bank took active countermeasures to block them that they couldn't overcome, what they would do is if you were a Mint user, they would just pop up a message that says like, "Sorry, Bank of America customer, we are no longer capable of scraping this account. Here is the phone number of the lawyer who sent us the C and D for Bank of America. Call them up and tell them you're a Bank of America customer who wants to access your own financial data." Right? So there are lots of ways around this. And mandates, on the other hand, you

• 49:10Speaker 05

  know, formal requirements, as we said, they're hard to enforce or administer, but they are very strong, right? If firms actually hew to a standard, the standard works. You know, you never buy a USB cigarette lighter adapter in a fishbowl at a gas station only to find that it doesn't work in your cigarette lighter receptacle in your car. Words really work, but they're brittle. So you have something that is very flexible, but but also doesn't hold very well. And then you have something that is very strong, but is easy to break. And you combine the two and you get two part epoxy, something that is resilient, but strong. And that's, that's why I think we need to combine both of these approaches.

• 49:52Speaker 05

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

• 50:14David Pierce?

  After all this time and effort and Amazon purchases and Docker downloads, I've now built a couple of things that stick. I have a Plex server, which rules, and I now use it all the time. I also now have all my notes in a collection of text files. And I'll never use another note taking app that doesn't read and write to that folder of text files stored on my computer. The two apps I'm switching between right now, if you're curious, are Note Plan and Obsidian. Obsidian, like we were talking about, is super powerful, but Note Plan is just really pretty, so I just keep coming back to it. I also still have Image running, but Docker takes up too much memory on my computer most of the time, so I mostly don't use it. I did rig up a way to use my B-Link mini PC as a universal file backup for all my stuff, but I also still have everything in Google Drive, too, because cloud services are great.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  It's much easier to get at my stuff in Google Drive. I just like having options. And I like that my stuff works now, even when AWS or Google Cloud doesn't, or when I'm on the train and don't have any Wi-Fi at all. I'm not really doing all this for big moral reasons, or because I'm afraid the cloud is going to get sentient and rule us all, or because I think we should destroy the tech giants. I just like my stuff being my stuff. And I don't think that's too much to ask.

• 51:25David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks so much to everyone who was on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. This is the last episode in our connectivity series. The whole series has been super fun. If you missed the earlier episodes, go check them out. And we have another fun mini series coming up starting next week, so stay tuned. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with episodes on Wednesday and Friday, talking about antitrust trials and video games and lots of other stuff. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 52:02Speaker 06

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