December 3, 2025 • 53 mins
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
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Don’t Do It Yourself
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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
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mike Rugnetta (00:10):
Friends, hello, and welcome Never Post, a
podcast for and about theInternet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was writtenon Tuesday, 12/02/2025 at
08:29AM eastern, and we have anenterprising show for you this
week. Audrey talks with softwareengineer, blogger, and hopeful
Internet owner Drew Leightonabout his realization that he's
(00:33):
a digital serf in a feudalisticpower imbalance. They discuss
his efforts to gain someautonomy by building his own
cloud server and also pew pewlake.
But right now, we're gonna takea quick break. You're gonna
listen to some ads unless you'reon the member feed. And when we
return, we're gonna talk about afew of the things that have
(00:53):
happened since the last time youheard from us. Yeah. I'm not big
on social graces.
I think I'll slip on down to theoasis. Oh, I've got five stories
for you this week. The radioscould get a big block of I p v
six addresses. An IETF orInternet Engineering Task Force
(01:14):
draft proposal calls for a blockof IP addresses to be given to
ham radio operators forexperimentation following in the
tradition set forth by theirbeing granted the 44 slash eight
block of IPv four addresses.Individual operators and amateur
organizers, the proposal reads,currently depend on commercial
(01:37):
Internet providers or regionalInternet registries for IPv6
connectivity, processes that areoften misaligned with the
amateur services non commercialand volunteer nature.
Provider assigned prefixes aretransient, non portable, and
frequently filtered making themunsuitable for long term
experimental networks. The newswebsite, The Register, calls the
(02:01):
request unusual, but says it maybe worth considering, quote,
because the amateur radiocommunity has a long history of
doing interesting things thatlater become useful in other
contexts. Guaranteed human, saysiHeartRadio. The name of its new
(02:24):
pledge summarizes the audioplatform's stance on AI
generated music andpersonalities. Billboard reports
that iHeart chief programmingofficer and president Tom
Pullman said in a letter tostaff that the company won't use
AI generated personalities orplay AI music that features
synthetic vocalists pretendingto be human.
(02:45):
Pullman describes this as apromise and shares unattributed
research claiming, quote, 70% ofconsumers say they use AI as a
tool, yet 90% want their mediato be from real humans. Solomon
(03:13):
Ray doesn't exist. The topartist on the iTunes top 100
Christian and gospel albumschart this week according to
christianitytoday.com is madewith AI. His appearance, lyrics,
music, the whole packagegenerated. Ray is associated
with tracks titled soul to theworld and jingle bell soul, and
(03:36):
yet, quote, at minimum, AI doesnot have the holy spirit inside
of it, Christian music singersongwriter Forrest Frank said on
Instagram.
So I think it's really weird tobe opening up your spirit to
something that has no spirit.Poems can fool AI into making
(03:58):
you a bomb, reports Wired.Generally, chatbots have inbuilt
guardrails to prevent them fromdiscoursing on the worst or most
dangerous subject matter, butresearchers in Rome found that,
quote, poetic framing achievedan average jailbreak success
rate of sixty two percent forhandcrafted poems, end quote.
(04:18):
Wired requested copies of thepoetry used to jailbreak the
models, getting them to holdforth on building munitions and
malware amongst other things.But the researchers refused,
saying the poems are toodangerous to be released to the
public.
Forbidden poetry. How exciting.And finally, FOMO defines the
(04:42):
experience of dating or datingapps. New research out of a
combined team from Austria andStanford published in New Media
and Society finds thatalgorithmic feeds drive
engagement in dating app use,keeping people swiping for
longer periods of time. But themore someone swipes, the more
(05:02):
they apparently trust thealgorithm will bring them the
partner they're looking for, andthose swipers also experience
strong decision fatigue.
Not swiping means they may missthe 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
(05:27):
Neverpost, but $48 a year isjust too much? Well, great news
because the Radiotopiafundraiser continues. This is
your opportunity to support notjust Neverpost, but every, every
Radiotopia show all at once, earhustle, hyperfixed articles of
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(05:53):
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Those are also tax deductible.Isn't that exciting? Head to
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you go to neverpo.st.
(06:13):
You look at all three tiers, andyou think this is too confusing.
Too many choices. Which tier isright for me? Well, good news,
folks. We have a year end saleon for the month of December.
You can get our $7 and $12 tiersfor the price of our lowest
tier, $4. That's $4 each. Now tobe clear, those $7 and $12 tiers
(06:39):
do and will always get youexactly the same thing as the $4
tier, but on sale is what theyare nonetheless. You may be
wondering, Mike, this soundslike it makes no sense. You
would be correct.
You cannot get these dealsdirect from the homepage, so
check the links in the shownotes to see our $4, $7 tier and
(07:02):
our $4, $12 tier. Get in onthese holiday savings. Okay.
That's the news I have for youthis week. In this episode,
Audrey talks with digital DIYerDrew Lighten.
But first, once a year, for justa few hours, the lake in front
of Hans' dad's house makes thissecret sound, and it happened
(07:26):
again just this week. So in ourinterstitials in this episode,
lake laser gun.
Hans Buetow (07:36):
How cold do you think it is right now? Seven
degrees. Is that for real? Itwas seven earlier. It's probably
warmer now.
Amy (07:44):
It's probably eight.
Hans Buetow (07:48):
So what happened last night? The wind went down,
and it got down to sevendegrees, 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.
(08:10):
So it's still thin, fresh, andit's one day window of making
noises should be open. It shouldsound good. Okay. Okay. Here we
go.
Let me just get the get thevolume up. So I throw the rocks
(08:46):
sort of level with, like, as ifI were skipping a rock, and the
rock obviously doesn't gothrough the ice. It just skips
across the top. And as it getsfurther and further out, it
makes more of a resonant sound,which only happens one day of
the year when it freezes. Howbig of a rock do you you can get
(09:13):
get out there?
Oh, they're about half inch.This these are three quarter.
These two are three quarter ofan inch, and they're pretty easy
to toss. They don't need to beflat like a skipping stone. They
can be round as better.
Audrey Evans (09:53):
Hello, friends. This is producer Audrey, Never
Post resident librarian andresearcher. You don't often hear
my voice on the podcast, but I'mone of the people behind the
scenes helping to frame andshape the segments. In our
behind the scenes editorialconversations, we think a lot
about how to trace where powerresides in our relationship to
(10:14):
technology and how technologyshifts our relationships to
ourselves and each other, howthe physical infrastructure
influences and obscures some ofthese dynamics. And we think
about how we, in turn, unveil,shape, and interrogate these
systems, both individually andcollectively.
I am really interested instories about people who are
(10:34):
engaging with these questionsdirectly. So I was really lucky
recently to have a conversationwith Drew Leighton. He's a
software engineer, blogger, andall around really fun guy to
chat with. We found Drew througha blog post with the subtitle,
in a world where corporationshave detached buying from
owning, one man attempts to dosomething radical, build his own
(10:57):
cloud. I was really excited tohear the story of Drew because
he's engaging really directlywith this question in his own
home, in his own life, and Iwanted to hear what he's
learned.
Spoiler, He did end up here.
Drew Lyton (11:14):
I think that this is not something I would recommend
to most people nor is a futurethat I think I personally am
going to fight for.
Audrey Evans (11:24):
But this is where we started. Hi, Drew.
Drew Lyton (11:40):
How's it going?
Audrey Evans (11:41):
Going great. I want you to, if you could, tell
us your name and who you are.
Drew Lyton (11:48):
Cool. So my name is Drew Lighten. I'm a software
engineer and a blogger. I writecode, and I write a blog about
code.
Audrey Evans (11:58):
Perfect. So I'm gonna drop us in here in a in a
big picture question first. Whatis the cloud?
Drew Lyton (12:16):
Totally. I think that to understand what we mean
when we say the cloud, it'simportant to know, like, what
physically the cloud is. Whatthe cloud is is actually just a
series of computers that areusually racked in big data
centers all across the worldthat all can communicate to each
(12:36):
other extremely fast to be ableto do, like, distributed
processing of, like, computerstuff that allows you and me to
access the data that exists onall of those computers in a
fast, reliable, and efficientway.
Audrey Evans (12:55):
Thank you so much. That's very helpful. The cloud
sounds so soft and fluffy andinnocent, but it's really all
metal wires and fans.
Drew Lyton (13:05):
Yes. Metals metal wires, fans, loud electricity
with very few people really,like, touching the actual
computer part. And then a lot alot of code and, like,
infrastructure tooling thatallows developers like me to
kind of be completely abstractedaway from the physical part of
(13:27):
the Internet. The fluffiness isthat. It's that I, as a person
that makes stuff on theInternet, don't have to think at
all about the hardware, and Ijust get to think about the
thing that I'm making.
And same with people on theother side, like you and me,
people that also consumeapplications, it feels fluffy
(13:49):
and nice because we don't haveto deal with any of the
management.
Audrey Evans (13:53):
I want you to take me back to early autumn of last
year. And what was sort of theecology of your cloud services
storage apps? What was your lifelike in relationship to the
cloud last year?
Drew Lyton (14:07):
Yeah. So last year, I was kind of taking stock of
my, like, digital tools andfound myself kinda like most
people just thinking about allof the subscription services
that I had gained over theyears. I've got Audible for
audiobooks. I've got my Kindlebooks hosted with Amazon. We're
(14:29):
paying for Netflix and HBO.
All of these, like, mediaservices that we are paying a
flat fee for, like, a few showsthat we really like. And I just
realized for the first time thatI was living in a world where I
essentially owned nothing andwas paying for the privilege of
(14:50):
being able to access stuff thatin some cases, I had even
bought.
Audrey Evans (14:56):
And they can take it away at any time.
Drew Lyton (14:58):
Not only can they take it away at any time, they
can also completely change theterms of that rental agreement.
Whereas like, in most states,there's like renters rights for
your house. There aren't reallyrenters rights for the stuff
that you access on the Internet.That's true.
Audrey Evans (15:16):
How did this make you feel? What was your dominant
emotion? Or there could be apalette of emotions here.
Drew Lyton (15:22):
Obviously, felt icky. But really what it felt
like is that I was in this powerdynamic between me and the
company where the company isproviding me space that I rent
from them. And then on top of itall, thinking of about how all
(15:44):
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 toaccess things that I'm supposed
to own while accessing the thingI'm supposed to own, they're
taxing me even more for it. Itfelt like I was in some sort of
(16:05):
feudalistic techno dystopiawhere these corporations are
landlords and I'm a serf with nopower and no freedom.
Yeah. So I was taking stock ofthis relationship I have where
essentially everything I own isrented space from companies like
HBO, Netflix, Amazon, likeAudible. And then I received an
(16:28):
email like many other Kindlecustomers from Amazon saying
that the Kindle platform wouldno longer be supporting this
feature that allowed you todownload and back up copies of
your books. So receiving thisannouncement from Amazon saying
that they were deprecating thatfeature and that the only way
(16:51):
that I and millions of Kindlecustomers would be able to
access their books would now bethrough the Kindle app or the
Kindle device did not sit superwell with me. So I wrote a
script actually to scrape theAmazon library, like, page where
(17:12):
you get to view and downloadyour books because they don't
they didn't give you a bulkdownload.
You had to do this individually.So after downloading all my
books, I decided to try toexplore alternatives.
Audrey Evans (17:25):
So you are a highly technical person.
Drew Lyton (17:29):
Mhmm.
Audrey Evans (17:29):
What did you do?
Drew Lyton (17:31):
I know that there are a lot of people in what's
called, like, the self hostedcommunity where they use open
source alternatives to popularcloud platforms and and run it
themselves on their own ownserver at home. So when we were
talking before about what is thecloud, they basically decide to,
(17:56):
with a fleet of tools and a lotof technical work, build their
own cloud in their house. Andbecause I'm a person that was
dealing kind of with this, like,feeling of a lack of control and
also someone with the technicalskills to believe that I could
gain back that control, I dovestraight into this community,
(18:18):
tried to learn as much aspossible, and ended up actually
building something that my wifeand I can use to self host and
replace a lot of cloud services.
Audrey Evans (18:29):
I love this. And I love I'm Is this a collaborative
project between you and yourwife?
Drew Lyton (18:35):
This is so interesting.
Audrey Evans (18:37):
How does that relationship work? Because it's
a very specific kind of
Drew Lyton (18:41):
Mhmm.
Audrey Evans (18:41):
Technical choice you've made as a couple.
Drew Lyton (18:43):
Yes. I think that I had really maybe naively
optimistic hopes that this wouldbe rather easy to do. Like, I
have a lot of technical skillsabout how to deploy software
that I figured would matchpretty well one to one. What I
didn't expect is the amount ofcomplexity that can come when
(19:06):
you try to build a home serverthat is accessible via the
normal Internet that isn'tpublic. Like, I didn't want all
of my, like, cloud hostedservices, my, like, personal
Google Photos, our personalebook library to be accessible
(19:27):
to anyone who knew any sort oflogin credential.
I wanted to make sure that itwas as firewalled as possible
for both the security of ourstuff and also our home Internet
and still have the convenienceof being able to be on a, like,
five g network and be able toback up a video I just took of
(19:48):
our new baby. I think that wasthe kind of requirements
analysis that ended up beingmore difficult than making a
really clean UI experience,which a lot of these tools kinda
give to you out of the box justby nature of how invested a lot
(20:08):
of these open source communitiesare around making these tools as
good as possible.
Audrey Evans (20:13):
I think we're ready for the technical.
Drew Lyton (20:16):
Sure.
Audrey Evans (20:16):
I think I'm ready to let it wash over me and enjoy
it.
Drew Lyton (20:21):
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Audrey Evans (20:22):
So once you've made the decision, what's the
first thing you did? Where didyou start? And then talk us
through what bits and pieces youbought and assembled. How did
you do this?
Drew Lyton (20:32):
Cool. I bought a Lenovo p five twenty, which is a
decommissioned server gradecomputer that has a 3.7
gigahertz Intel Xeon processorwith a 128 gigabytes of RAM,
which I then installed a GTXsixteen sixty Ti graphics card
with six gigabytes of VRAM intoso that I could do quick audio
(20:53):
and video encoding. I flashed a500 gigabyte SSD with Proxmox,
which is a hypervisor sort ofsoftware package, and set up
four eight terabyte hard drivesin a merger FS pool with
SnapRaid, which allowed me tohave drive parity in case one of
them failed. And then I added atwo terabyte NVMe SSD to use as
(21:14):
a storage cache. That's thehardware.
After that, I installed theTailscale, which is a really
great VPN, client, and createdan Ubuntu LXC container, which
is like a virtual environmentrunning Linux, which I installed
the Tailscale and Docker ontothat virtual machine, pulled
(21:34):
down a GitHub repo that I hadmade that set up a bunch of
Docker Compose files, which isanother way of doing virtual
virtualization for running apps.And then I hacked into the
mainframe and ran Docker Composeup d, and finally, all of my
stuff was done. Yes.
Audrey Evans (21:55):
I feel I feel that I knew, like, half of the things
you said. So what did you haveat the end of all of this
tinkering?
Drew Lyton (22:05):
So at the end of it all, I had four open source
alternatives to popular cloudhosted apps that my wife and I
had been using. One of them iscalled Image, which is a
complete clone of Google Photosthat has a mobile app, great
organization, and backupfeatures. It has local machine
learning for, like, photo basedsearch similar to what you'd get
(22:26):
through iCloud or Google Photos.I had an ebook library
management tool called Calibreor Calibre Web that allows you
to organize backup EPUB filesand with some, like, clever
hacking, actually have themappear wirelessly on your Kobo
or Kindle device. I had anaudiobook library tool called
(22:51):
Audio Bookshelf, which isanother just open source version
of Audible.
And it also has this fun featurethat lets you treat audiobooks
like podcasts. So you can have,like, RSS feeds of audiobooks
that make them all the chaptersappear as different files as if
they're, like, in a podcast,which is very cool. And the last
(23:13):
one is an open sourcealternative to, like, Netflix or
Disney plus called Jellyfin,which is just a streaming
service to watch home homevideos or legally acquired
movies and TV. And the entirecomputer, I also use as, like, a
NAS, a network attached storagedevice so that my wife and I can
(23:36):
back up our computers and that Ican access all of my, like,
swathes of video files and nothave to pay Google a gazillion
dollars to back up all thatstuff for me.
Audrey Evans (23:47):
Beautiful. I'm so proud of you. I just met you,
but I'm proud. I'm proud of
Drew Lyton (23:51):
you. Thanks.
Audrey Evans (23:55):
Do you remember the first time you turned it on
and it worked?
Drew Lyton (24:00):
I remember so the first time that I booted
everything up after installingall the hardware is always like
a scary time. Because whenyou're sitting in a room with
the side panel off of adecommissioned server that's ten
or twelve years old, and youbought it on eBay and you have
(24:22):
no idea how well someone tookcare of this thing. And then
you've sat there with all ofyour random woodworking tools to
try to precisely install a bunchof 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 doessome horrible beep because
(24:43):
computer manufacturers don'tcare how you feel when you turn
on a computer, and you don'tknow whether that beep was good
or bad.
Right. But it turns out to begood and it just shows up on
your display and you can startinstalling software, that's that
is a magic moment. Because atleast for me, someone that sits
on the software side oftechnical stuff, the being done
(25:05):
with the hardware aspect isalways a really nice feeling.
The first time that I actuallybooted up the applications,
which I did in stages. Right?
Like, I started with Calibre,installing this application that
I had never run before. And alsowith the added complexity of,
like, it's sitting on a computerthat doesn't have a monitor
(25:28):
because it's a server. That wascool to see it appear in my
browser and, like, be able tolog in and start setting this
up. Exciting moment. The secondexciting moment was when I did
the giant library dump fromGoogle where I downloaded our
entire Google Photos library,which was over three terabytes
(25:51):
of photos and videos, and ranthis crazy amazing tool that
someone in the open sourcecommunity had made that takes
your Google archive, which arethese massive, like, 50 gigabyte
zip files and pulls out all ofthe media, pulls all out all the
(26:11):
metadata, converts it tosomething that Image can read
and use, and uploads it all toits database.
And that took, I think, aroundsix hours. And then all of my
stuff appeared on my phone in away that I had not really
(26:31):
experienced before because it'slike when you move house and
you're seeing things that youknew you had but have not looked
at in a while, that was thisexperience moving everything to
a self hosted server, a digitalmove in a literal and a
figurative sense. And so you'reunpacking boxes and you're
(26:54):
trying to make sure thateverything survived the move.
And in that way, you're reexperiencing a lot of your your
digital archive.
Audrey Evans (27:01):
Beautiful. You'd be a great librarian.
Drew Lyton (27:07):
I think I'm too disorganized. But
Audrey Evans (27:09):
I don't think so. Not based on what I've heard so
far.
Drew Lyton (27:13):
Yeah. You're seeing the most pristine part of my
office. So
Audrey Evans (27:19):
Well, also the the values and the and the care that
you have in your relationship tointentionality with technology
is is very librarian coded.
Drew Lyton (27:30):
This moment of bringing everything from
Google's cloud down to my ownserver, what reminded me of
that, like, ah, this is mereally doing the work to curate,
maintain, and keep a durablebackup personal archive of my
(27:53):
stuff and, like, who I am andwho 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 hadaccess to do something like
this?
(28:14):
And almost an immediateacknowledgment that, like, this
is not the way.
Audrey Evans (28:47):
Do you feel comfortable sharing what room
you self host in?
Drew Lyton (28:53):
Yeah. So we live in not a super large townhouse. So
our computer, our self hostedserver is actually right next to
our couch in our living room.
Audrey Evans (29:09):
Can you hear it?
Drew Lyton (29:10):
Fortunately, you cannot hear it, really. There's,
like, a little bit of hummingand, like, beeps and boops, you
know, like, of a normal oldcomputer that's kind of running
in your house, but not nearly asbad as I thought it would be,
which was also part of therequirement for me and my wife
is that we want this. We wantour home to not feel like a data
(29:31):
center. Yeah. Yeah.
Big part of it. Exactly. Interms of location, it made the
most sense to put it in ourliving room mostly because
that's where our Wi Fi routerrouter is. So
Audrey Evans (29:43):
I love knowing painting the picture of of what
does this actually look and feellike to do something like this
in your actual home. And thatyou you see it, you interact
with it as an object constantly.
Drew Lyton (29:56):
And not yeah. And to color that even more. So the
computer that is running all ofour services that is sitting in
our living room, like, justchugging 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 thecouch. Like, this is a real
piece of technology that existsalmost as decor, as useful
(30:19):
furniture in in the physicalrealm as much as in the digital.
Audrey Evans (30:24):
Is there, like, a particular day in the life of
hosting your own server that youthat is an interesting day?
Drew Lyton (30:31):
So in the day to day, I think that it's set up
well enough that I don't thinkabout it. Like, I have image on
my phone and it looks I'mlooking at it right now and it
looks identical to GooglePhotos. It's currently backing
up all the photos that I took,like, a few minutes ago. And so
in general, I think it's prettyhands off where on the non
(30:54):
normal days where I I do have tothink about it, the day to day
experience is me going into theterminal, SSH ing into my
server, and reading logs of the,like, Docker files that are
running and trying to figure outwhy something broke, what went
wrong, looking at memory usagegraphs, looking at CPU spikes,
(31:16):
trying to understand whyrandomly my graphics card
disconnected from the entireLinux container, you know. But
that stuff is pretty few and farbetween now.
It's both much more stable andmuch less stable than I think I
thought at the beginning, likein different ways.
Audrey Evans (31:34):
Okay. Yeah. So how does this self hosted experience
feel compared to your rentedcloud experience?
Drew Lyton (31:46):
All in all, I think that these open source
alternatives provide a prettygood one to one to cloud based
options. A lot of them don'thave as clean or as modern of a
UI as you might want. But thingslike image and jellyfin, I'd say
are as good, if not better, UIexperiences. And a lot of that
(32:08):
has to do with the great work ofthe open source maintainers who
put in all of the effort to notonly make these run well on a
lot of different types ofhardware, but also put in a lot
of time and effort into makingthe experience a good one where
you would wouldn't miss theniceties of having a team of 400
(32:30):
people at Google who spend everywaking moment trying to get you
to use Google Photos.
Audrey Evans (32:35):
Right. Do you think this is a sustainable
choice for you and your wife andand your imminently to be born
new child.
Drew Lyton (32:47):
Yeah.
Audrey Evans (32:47):
Yeah. Have you learned anything about your
relationship throughcollaborating and working Oh. In
this way together?
Drew Lyton (32:54):
I think we've definitely learned that we're
hoarders. Like, I I think theexperience of having to have on
a hard drive in your home all ofyour important files, documents,
everything is both, like,exciting and also an
(33:22):
acknowledgment of, like, thereare only so many resources and
do we really need this videothat I shot when I was, like, 18
of me running home from from,like, getting groceries or
whatever. Like like, there is alot of, I think, feelings of
less separation in terms of ourrelationship to, like, digital
(33:47):
files and goods being feelingmore physical and having a cost,
which is, I think, something wedidn't really think of before.
And also means we have to haveconversations together about
similar to how you have to haveconversations with your partner
about, like, we only have somuch closet space, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe it's time for us todeclutter. Like, you have to
(34:08):
have that now with your digitallife Yeah. In a way that you
kind of don't when the thesolution is just to throw more
money at the problem.
Audrey Evans (34:18):
Yeah. Exactly. Pay for
Drew Lyton (34:19):
more storage.
Audrey Evans (34:19):
Sometimes friction in relationship can surface
values and opportunities.
Drew Lyton (34:24):
Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And there are very new
conversations we're having aboutwho is in charge of curating the
digital closet. A new chore thatdidn't exist before we had a
humming, you know, piece offurniture that stores all of our
digital life.
Audrey Evans (34:43):
I love this. Well, maybe we'll have to do a part
two with your wife at somepoint. And the new baby and see
follow-up with you in six monthsand see how it's all going.
Drew Lyton (34:55):
Yeah. There is a conversation we've been having
about how does this new, like,piece of furniture, this new
appliance, this tool we haveaffect, if at all, our kids'
relationship with a computer?And what does this new tool
enable us to do in terms of kindof curating and guiding their
(35:16):
experience through the earlystages of learning about the
Internet, where we now have ourown little Internet that is,
like, more safe. Right? And,like, private and controlled by
us.
And what does that enable us todo in terms of teaching and
learning about how to use thesetools?
Audrey Evans (35:38):
Did building your own cloud in your house, did it
feel like a radical act?
Drew Lyton (35:47):
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. Andsometimes that makes you feel
like a pioneer. In this case, itmade me feel slightly, like,
(36:08):
crazy. Like, there has to be areason that I don't know anyone
else that is doing this. Yeah.
You know, not to spoil it toomuch, but there was something. I
was like, this was this was nota trivial thing to do. Yeah.
Audrey Evans (36:22):
Why do you speculate you don't know anyone
else doing this?
Drew Lyton (36:26):
I think there's a lot of reasons that people don't
self host ubiquitously. One ofthem is, for most people, it's
technically inaccessible.Convincing some people I know in
my life to build a computerwould be very hard. To convince
them to build a computer thatwill run hypervisor software, to
(36:49):
run Linux containers withDocker, and have a VPN setup
with Tailscale, that seemsimpossible.
Audrey Evans (37:02):
Even as a person who is wants to do all of those
things, the learning curve feelsextreme.
Drew Lyton (37:10):
Yeah. I I think so that that's a big part of it. I
think the technicalinaccessibility is probably 80%
of why we don't see more peopledoing this. I think the other
20% is cost.
Audrey Evans (37:26):
Okay. Say more.
Drew Lyton (37:28):
It wasn't cheap to do this. And I did it on a
pretty low budget in comparisonto some people in this
community. I bought a twelveyear old decommissioned server
off of eBay for around $330 thathad, like, a ton of RAM and a
(37:51):
relatively fine CPU. I spentclose to, I think, $800 on hard
drives. Now you don't have to dothat, but I did that because I
have a lot of video files that Iwanted to store.
I bought stuff that you probablywouldn't ever need, like a
(38:12):
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. Andobviously, like, I'm a tech
person and so I had a lot ofthis stuff lying around from
other projects. But even if youjust take the base computer,
(38:32):
like investing $400 in somethingis not an like a no brainer
decision, especially when you'recomparing it to the cost of a
hosted cloud solution, whichcosts $12 a month.
Audrey Evans (38:46):
Yeah. Do you think that people should be doing
this? Like, in general, as ageneral approach to is this the
sort of way forward?
Drew Lyton (38:57):
Mhmm. I think a world in which everyone is able
to self host all of their ownversions of applications and
have, like, complete backups oftheir digital lives, own their
own data, all of theseidealistic ways of using and
(39:18):
experiencing the Internet andmaking it personal. I think that
vision and that underlyingemotion of, like, both freedom
and control totally vibe withme. That's why I did this thing.
And yet, I think that this isnot something I would recommend
(39:39):
to most people nor is a futurethat I think I personally am
going to fight for.
And the reason is that I thinkthat it creates a kind of
suburban Internet wherealongside your lawnmower and
your car, you have a server thatyou have to maintain and take
(40:00):
care of. I think that that's areally inefficient use of
resources, is technicallyinaccessible for most people,
and gets rid of a lot of thegreat stuff about the cloud.
Audrey Evans (40:17):
Yes.
Drew Lyton (40:17):
The cloud is this, like, abstraction away from this
very complicated thing offiguring out how do I connect
myself to data and informationand files that are backed up and
distributed and cached and allthese things that make it super
(40:41):
fast and simple and easy to do.That infrastructure is really a
feat of engineering and issomething that we really benefit
from and shouldn't be arequirement for everyone to try
to recreate for themselves.Yeah. I think, like, one of the
fundamental problems with thisvision of a completely self
(41:06):
hosted future is that it assumesthat isolated independent
systems are virtuous. But,really, isolated independent
systems are really inconvenient.
Like, self hosting is, yeah,like, personalized and private
(41:29):
and individual. But how then arewe supposed to be able to have,
like, photo albums that areshared amongst you and me if
both of ours, like, the theamount of technological
infrastructure we would have tocreate and that I'm I know
people in this community areworking on with, like, peer to
(41:52):
peer networking and distributed,like like, protocols, that all
seems cool. And, also, I thinkthe easier and maybe more long
term beneficial approach is thatrather than us all owning our
own clouds, we should just ownthe cloud.
Audrey Evans (42:12):
Yeah. So that's my that's my exact question for you
is if we don't want to pay acorporate entity to, you know,
rent cloud storage and buildingour own personal cloud is maybe
not an option or even adesirable future as you've
listed out for us reasons whynot. Could you talk us through
(42:34):
another vision of maybe buildinga communal shared Internet
infrastructure? What would acommunity hosted cloud look
like? How would it work?
What would need to happen for usto get there?
Drew Lyton (42:47):
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, youalso get access to, like, a 100
gigabytes of file storage andaccess to a, like, publicly
hosted, like, photo sharingplatform, Google Drive
(43:11):
alternative, that that visionseems unattainable until you
realize that many corporations,nonprofit organizations,
schools, all already providethat to their constituents. This
idea that having some sort ofpublic infrastructure to be able
(43:35):
to provide services on theInternet 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 myhouse to have my wife and I be
able to back up our photos,access our media. This is the
(43:56):
same system that could be usedamongst a community of people to
have one or multiple servers oreven set up hosted solutions in
current data centerinfrastructure to be able to
provide that to thousands ofpeople instead of two.
I don't think that that's crazy.
Audrey Evans (44:15):
It's not. It's not crazy at all. And it might be
something that we need one day.
Drew Lyton (44:21):
Yeah. And even so I wrote an article talking about
this experience, and someonereached out to me saying, hey. I
live in Arizona, and I'm doingthis. I am building public
infrastructure for my town inArizona and trying to work with
(44:43):
my local municipality and thelibrary to make this not, like,
only marketed, but actually wellestablished and sustainable. And
his experience was that the hardpart is not the tech.
The hard part is convincingcommunities that the tech bros
(45:06):
could actually provide a goodpublic service to them. There is
so much distrust around peoplethat provide technology to us
right now that the notion thatthe tools that are currently
used by the lords to lord overus, the serfs, could be
(45:30):
accessible to them in a waythat's co owned and cooperative
seems outlandish and, like, thatit's got to be a scam.
Audrey Evans (45:42):
And maybe that's the work that has to be done to
bring those communities into theprocess.
Drew Lyton (45:48):
I think that that is totally the work to be done. It
is not we have solved thetechnical problems. The open
source community, the selfhosted community, they've done
it. And now I think it is thework of us as technologists and
people that are passionate aboutproviding this to our
(46:09):
communities to do the socialwork, to repair trust, and to
actually build connections andrelationships that allow a more
community hosted and communalInternet to something that makes
you really feel empowered andconnected to your community and
(46:32):
that this is co owned andshared.
Audrey Evans (46:33):
I'm literally crying right now.
Drew Lyton (46:35):
No. And that's all stuff that the Internet was
meant to be. Right? Like, thisis the original vision of the
Internet. Yeah.
So there's just a lot of work todo.
Audrey Evans (46:44):
Yeah. Are you suggesting we feel hopeful about
the Internet?
Drew Lyton (46:51):
I don't know. With all of the wackadoo stuff
happening with AI and whether ornot the Internet, you know, like
dead Internet theory and allthis stuff, I do feel like it's
hard to have hope. But I reallydo believe in this, like,
counter cultural idea of thealive Internet theory where
these are places that we liveand work. These are
(47:15):
fundamentally public socialspaces. And we, for thousands of
years, have both struggled andfigured out how to do public
spaces pretty well.
And it's just about leveragingall of that historical knowledge
and tapping into the people thatalready have that information to
(47:38):
make that happen, to make theInternet really feel alive and
like ours again.
Audrey Evans (47:56):
Drew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
your This experience with was somuch fun for me. I learned so
much. If people wanna find youonline, where can they find you?
Drew Lyton (48:09):
Yeah. So I can be found mostly only these days at
drewlighton.com. That'sdrewlyton.com. I post a
newsletter semi frequently withstories like this. So, yeah, if
people enjoyed hearing me talkabout this, maybe you'll enjoy
(48:30):
reading words I've written aboutit.
Hans Buetow (49:09):
Five. I'll throw five this time. That that way
you run out of rocks reallyquickly.
(49:40):
Whoo. Starting to lose feelingin my fingers.
(50:07):
That's awesome. And then ifyou're lucky, the ice, the sun
will heat up the rocks. Therocks will melt through the ice,
and you won't run into them whenyou're skating. Well, that was a
lot of fun. That's the secret ofthe lake.
(50:29):
Only one day of the year or onlyeach time that it freezes,
freshly frozen, the same daythat it freezes, it makes that
really resonant sound as youskip the rocks as they get
further and further out.
Amy (50:54):
That sun is warm though.
Hans Buetow (50:57):
It helps.
Mike Rugnetta (51:08):
That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the mainfeed on Wednesday, December 10.
Never post is made each andevery two weeks by a team of six
producers researching, writing,interviewing, editing, mixing,
and scoring, and designing theirhearts out. If you appreciate
the work that we do and wouldlike to help us continue to do
(51:29):
it, please consider becoming amember for $4, $4, or $4 a month
at neverpo.st today. NeverPost's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and themysterious doctor first name,
(51:52):
last name.
Our senior producer is HansButo. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer, and the show'shost, that's me, is Mike
Rignetta. Trespasser, a highstone wall. I continue to
obsessively study improving yourhurdle technique online. The red
(52:16):
curve of the track guiding fromthe right to the left of the
image as drills, minidisciplines are suggested over
and over.
I was young when I heardrecounted to me the terror and
excitement of being chased offfarmland, thinking there was a
gun scaling over to escape withsuperhuman force. Even then, I
(52:39):
wanted to be part of the chase.Excerpt of The Blank Jumped Over
the Blank Along a Line a Leap aLanding by Rowan Powell.
Neverpost is a production ofCharts and Leisure and is
distributed by Radiotopia.
Friends, hello, and welcome Never Post, a
podcast for and about theInternet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was writtenon Tuesday, 12/02/2025 at
08:29AM eastern, and we have anenterprising show for you this
week. Audrey talks with softwareengineer, blogger, and hopeful
Internet owner Drew Leightonabout his realization that he's
(00:33):
a digital serf in a feudalisticpower imbalance. They discuss
his efforts to gain someautonomy by building his own
cloud server and also pew pewlake.
But right now, we're gonna takea quick break. You're gonna
listen to some ads unless you'reon the member feed. And when we
return, we're gonna talk about afew of the things that have
(00:53):
happened since the last time youheard from us. Yeah. I'm not big
on social graces.
I think I'll slip on down to theoasis. Oh, I've got five stories
for you this week. The radioscould get a big block of I p v
six addresses. An IETF orInternet Engineering Task Force
(01:14):
draft proposal calls for a blockof IP addresses to be given to
ham radio operators forexperimentation following in the
tradition set forth by theirbeing granted the 44 slash eight
block of IPv four addresses.Individual operators and amateur
organizers, the proposal reads,currently depend on commercial
(01:37):
Internet providers or regionalInternet registries for IPv6
connectivity, processes that areoften misaligned with the
amateur services non commercialand volunteer nature.
Provider assigned prefixes aretransient, non portable, and
frequently filtered making themunsuitable for long term
experimental networks. The newswebsite, The Register, calls the
(02:01):
request unusual, but says it maybe worth considering, quote,
because the amateur radiocommunity has a long history of
doing interesting things thatlater become useful in other
contexts. Guaranteed human, saysiHeartRadio. The name of its new
(02:24):
pledge summarizes the audioplatform's stance on AI
generated music andpersonalities. Billboard reports
that iHeart chief programmingofficer and president Tom
Pullman said in a letter tostaff that the company won't use
AI generated personalities orplay AI music that features
synthetic vocalists pretendingto be human.
(02:45):
Pullman describes this as apromise and shares unattributed
research claiming, quote, 70% ofconsumers say they use AI as a
tool, yet 90% want their mediato be from real humans. Solomon
(03:13):
Ray doesn't exist. The topartist on the iTunes top 100
Christian and gospel albumschart this week according to
christianitytoday.com is madewith AI. His appearance, lyrics,
music, the whole packagegenerated. Ray is associated
with tracks titled soul to theworld and jingle bell soul, and
(03:36):
yet, quote, at minimum, AI doesnot have the holy spirit inside
of it, Christian music singersongwriter Forrest Frank said on
Instagram.
So I think it's really weird tobe opening up your spirit to
something that has no spirit.Poems can fool AI into making
(03:58):
you a bomb, reports Wired.Generally, chatbots have inbuilt
guardrails to prevent them fromdiscoursing on the worst or most
dangerous subject matter, butresearchers in Rome found that,
quote, poetic framing achievedan average jailbreak success
rate of sixty two percent forhandcrafted poems, end quote.
(04:18):
Wired requested copies of thepoetry used to jailbreak the
models, getting them to holdforth on building munitions and
malware amongst other things.But the researchers refused,
saying the poems are toodangerous to be released to the
public.
Forbidden poetry. How exciting.And finally, FOMO defines the
(04:42):
experience of dating or datingapps. New research out of a
combined team from Austria andStanford published in New Media
and Society finds thatalgorithmic feeds drive
engagement in dating app use,keeping people swiping for
longer periods of time. But themore someone swipes, the more
(05:02):
they apparently trust thealgorithm will bring them the
partner they're looking for, andthose swipers also experience
strong decision fatigue.
Not swiping means they may missthe 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
(05:27):
Neverpost, but $48 a year isjust too much? Well, great news
because the Radiotopiafundraiser continues. This is
your opportunity to support notjust Neverpost, but every, every
Radiotopia show all at once, earhustle, hyperfixed articles of
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caboodle with a single one timetax deductible donation or a
(05:53):
recurring one.
Those are also tax deductible.Isn't that exciting? Head to
radiotopia.fm/donate to give aone time tax deductible donation
or a recurring tax deductibledonation. Help us do the thing
we do. Do you wish you couldsupport NeverPo's directly, but
you go to neverpo.st.
(06:13):
You look at all three tiers, andyou think this is too confusing.
Too many choices. Which tier isright for me? Well, good news,
folks. We have a year end saleon for the month of December.
You can get our $7 and $12 tiersfor the price of our lowest
tier, $4. That's $4 each. Now tobe clear, those $7 and $12 tiers
(06:39):
do and will always get youexactly the same thing as the $4
tier, but on sale is what theyare nonetheless. You may be
wondering, Mike, this soundslike it makes no sense. You
would be correct.
You cannot get these dealsdirect from the homepage, so
check the links in the shownotes to see our $4, $7 tier and
(07:02):
our $4, $12 tier. Get in onthese holiday savings. Okay.
That's the news I have for youthis week. In this episode,
Audrey talks with digital DIYerDrew Lighten.
But first, once a year, for justa few hours, the lake in front
of Hans' dad's house makes thissecret sound, and it happened
(07:26):
again just this week. So in ourinterstitials in this episode,
lake laser gun.
Hans Buetow (07:36):
How cold do you think it is right now? Seven
degrees. Is that for real? Itwas seven earlier. It's probably
warmer now.
Amy (07:44):
It's probably eight.
Hans Buetow (07:48):
So what happened last night? The wind went down,
and it got down to sevendegrees, 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.
(08:10):
So it's still thin, fresh, andit's one day window of making
noises should be open. It shouldsound good. Okay. Okay. Here we
go.
Let me just get the get thevolume up. So I throw the rocks
(08:46):
sort of level with, like, as ifI were skipping a rock, and the
rock obviously doesn't gothrough the ice. It just skips
across the top. And as it getsfurther and further out, it
makes more of a resonant sound,which only happens one day of
the year when it freezes. Howbig of a rock do you you can get
(09:13):
get out there?
Oh, they're about half inch.This these are three quarter.
These two are three quarter ofan inch, and they're pretty easy
to toss. They don't need to beflat like a skipping stone. They
can be round as better.
Audrey Evans (09:53):
Hello, friends. This is producer Audrey, Never
Post resident librarian andresearcher. You don't often hear
my voice on the podcast, but I'mone of the people behind the
scenes helping to frame andshape the segments. In our
behind the scenes editorialconversations, we think a lot
about how to trace where powerresides in our relationship to
(10:14):
technology and how technologyshifts our relationships to
ourselves and each other, howthe physical infrastructure
influences and obscures some ofthese dynamics. And we think
about how we, in turn, unveil,shape, and interrogate these
systems, both individually andcollectively.
I am really interested instories about people who are
(10:34):
engaging with these questionsdirectly. So I was really lucky
recently to have a conversationwith Drew Leighton. He's a
software engineer, blogger, andall around really fun guy to
chat with. We found Drew througha blog post with the subtitle,
in a world where corporationshave detached buying from
owning, one man attempts to dosomething radical, build his own
(10:57):
cloud. I was really excited tohear the story of Drew because
he's engaging really directlywith this question in his own
home, in his own life, and Iwanted to hear what he's
learned.
Spoiler, He did end up here.
Drew Lyton (11:14):
I think that this is not something I would recommend
to most people nor is a futurethat I think I personally am
going to fight for.
Audrey Evans (11:24):
But this is where we started. Hi, Drew.
Drew Lyton (11:40):
How's it going?
Audrey Evans (11:41):
Going great. I want you to, if you could, tell
us your name and who you are.
Drew Lyton (11:48):
Cool. So my name is Drew Lighten. I'm a software
engineer and a blogger. I writecode, and I write a blog about
code.
Audrey Evans (11:58):
Perfect. So I'm gonna drop us in here in a in a
big picture question first. Whatis the cloud?
Drew Lyton (12:16):
Totally. I think that to understand what we mean
when we say the cloud, it'simportant to know, like, what
physically the cloud is. Whatthe cloud is is actually just a
series of computers that areusually racked in big data
centers all across the worldthat all can communicate to each
(12:36):
other extremely fast to be ableto do, like, distributed
processing of, like, computerstuff that allows you and me to
access the data that exists onall of those computers in a
fast, reliable, and efficientway.
Audrey Evans (12:55):
Thank you so much. That's very helpful. The cloud
sounds so soft and fluffy andinnocent, but it's really all
metal wires and fans.
Drew Lyton (13:05):
Yes. Metals metal wires, fans, loud electricity
with very few people really,like, touching the actual
computer part. And then a lot alot of code and, like,
infrastructure tooling thatallows developers like me to
kind of be completely abstractedaway from the physical part of
(13:27):
the Internet. The fluffiness isthat. It's that I, as a person
that makes stuff on theInternet, don't have to think at
all about the hardware, and Ijust get to think about the
thing that I'm making.
And same with people on theother side, like you and me,
people that also consumeapplications, it feels fluffy
(13:49):
and nice because we don't haveto deal with any of the
management.
Audrey Evans (13:53):
I want you to take me back to early autumn of last
year. And what was sort of theecology of your cloud services
storage apps? What was your lifelike in relationship to the
cloud last year?
Drew Lyton (14:07):
Yeah. So last year, I was kind of taking stock of
my, like, digital tools andfound myself kinda like most
people just thinking about allof the subscription services
that I had gained over theyears. I've got Audible for
audiobooks. I've got my Kindlebooks hosted with Amazon. We're
(14:29):
paying for Netflix and HBO.
All of these, like, mediaservices that we are paying a
flat fee for, like, a few showsthat we really like. And I just
realized for the first time thatI was living in a world where I
essentially owned nothing andwas paying for the privilege of
(14:50):
being able to access stuff thatin some cases, I had even
bought.
Audrey Evans (14:56):
And they can take it away at any time.
Drew Lyton (14:58):
Not only can they take it away at any time, they
can also completely change theterms of that rental agreement.
Whereas like, in most states,there's like renters rights for
your house. There aren't reallyrenters rights for the stuff
that you access on the Internet.That's true.
Audrey Evans (15:16):
How did this make you feel? What was your dominant
emotion? Or there could be apalette of emotions here.
Drew Lyton (15:22):
Obviously, felt icky. But really what it felt
like is that I was in this powerdynamic between me and the
company where the company isproviding me space that I rent
from them. And then on top of itall, thinking of about how all
(15:44):
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 toaccess things that I'm supposed
to own while accessing the thingI'm supposed to own, they're
taxing me even more for it. Itfelt like I was in some sort of
(16:05):
feudalistic techno dystopiawhere these corporations are
landlords and I'm a serf with nopower and no freedom.
Yeah. So I was taking stock ofthis relationship I have where
essentially everything I own isrented space from companies like
HBO, Netflix, Amazon, likeAudible. And then I received an
(16:28):
email like many other Kindlecustomers from Amazon saying
that the Kindle platform wouldno longer be supporting this
feature that allowed you todownload and back up copies of
your books. So receiving thisannouncement from Amazon saying
that they were deprecating thatfeature and that the only way
(16:51):
that I and millions of Kindlecustomers would be able to
access their books would now bethrough the Kindle app or the
Kindle device did not sit superwell with me. So I wrote a
script actually to scrape theAmazon library, like, page where
(17:12):
you get to view and downloadyour books because they don't
they didn't give you a bulkdownload.
You had to do this individually.So after downloading all my
books, I decided to try toexplore alternatives.
Audrey Evans (17:25):
So you are a highly technical person.
Drew Lyton (17:29):
Mhmm.
Audrey Evans (17:29):
What did you do?
Drew Lyton (17:31):
I know that there are a lot of people in what's
called, like, the self hostedcommunity where they use open
source alternatives to popularcloud platforms and and run it
themselves on their own ownserver at home. So when we were
talking before about what is thecloud, they basically decide to,
(17:56):
with a fleet of tools and a lotof technical work, build their
own cloud in their house. Andbecause I'm a person that was
dealing kind of with this, like,feeling of a lack of control and
also someone with the technicalskills to believe that I could
gain back that control, I dovestraight into this community,
(18:18):
tried to learn as much aspossible, and ended up actually
building something that my wifeand I can use to self host and
replace a lot of cloud services.
Audrey Evans (18:29):
I love this. And I love I'm Is this a collaborative
project between you and yourwife?
Drew Lyton (18:35):
This is so interesting.
Audrey Evans (18:37):
How does that relationship work? Because it's
a very specific kind of
Drew Lyton (18:41):
Mhmm.
Audrey Evans (18:41):
Technical choice you've made as a couple.
Drew Lyton (18:43):
Yes. I think that I had really maybe naively
optimistic hopes that this wouldbe rather easy to do. Like, I
have a lot of technical skillsabout how to deploy software
that I figured would matchpretty well one to one. What I
didn't expect is the amount ofcomplexity that can come when
(19:06):
you try to build a home serverthat is accessible via the
normal Internet that isn'tpublic. Like, I didn't want all
of my, like, cloud hostedservices, my, like, personal
Google Photos, our personalebook library to be accessible
(19:27):
to anyone who knew any sort oflogin credential.
I wanted to make sure that itwas as firewalled as possible
for both the security of ourstuff and also our home Internet
and still have the convenienceof being able to be on a, like,
five g network and be able toback up a video I just took of
(19:48):
our new baby. I think that wasthe kind of requirements
analysis that ended up beingmore difficult than making a
really clean UI experience,which a lot of these tools kinda
give to you out of the box justby nature of how invested a lot
(20:08):
of these open source communitiesare around making these tools as
good as possible.
Audrey Evans (20:13):
I think we're ready for the technical.
Drew Lyton (20:16):
Sure.
Audrey Evans (20:16):
I think I'm ready to let it wash over me and enjoy
it.
Drew Lyton (20:21):
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Audrey Evans (20:22):
So once you've made the decision, what's the
first thing you did? Where didyou start? And then talk us
through what bits and pieces youbought and assembled. How did
you do this?
Drew Lyton (20:32):
Cool. I bought a Lenovo p five twenty, which is a
decommissioned server gradecomputer that has a 3.7
gigahertz Intel Xeon processorwith a 128 gigabytes of RAM,
which I then installed a GTXsixteen sixty Ti graphics card
with six gigabytes of VRAM intoso that I could do quick audio
(20:53):
and video encoding. I flashed a500 gigabyte SSD with Proxmox,
which is a hypervisor sort ofsoftware package, and set up
four eight terabyte hard drivesin a merger FS pool with
SnapRaid, which allowed me tohave drive parity in case one of
them failed. And then I added atwo terabyte NVMe SSD to use as
(21:14):
a storage cache. That's thehardware.
After that, I installed theTailscale, which is a really
great VPN, client, and createdan Ubuntu LXC container, which
is like a virtual environmentrunning Linux, which I installed
the Tailscale and Docker ontothat virtual machine, pulled
(21:34):
down a GitHub repo that I hadmade that set up a bunch of
Docker Compose files, which isanother way of doing virtual
virtualization for running apps.And then I hacked into the
mainframe and ran Docker Composeup d, and finally, all of my
stuff was done. Yes.
Audrey Evans (21:55):
I feel I feel that I knew, like, half of the things
you said. So what did you haveat the end of all of this
tinkering?
Drew Lyton (22:05):
So at the end of it all, I had four open source
alternatives to popular cloudhosted apps that my wife and I
had been using. One of them iscalled Image, which is a
complete clone of Google Photosthat has a mobile app, great
organization, and backupfeatures. It has local machine
learning for, like, photo basedsearch similar to what you'd get
(22:26):
through iCloud or Google Photos.I had an ebook library
management tool called Calibreor Calibre Web that allows you
to organize backup EPUB filesand with some, like, clever
hacking, actually have themappear wirelessly on your Kobo
or Kindle device. I had anaudiobook library tool called
(22:51):
Audio Bookshelf, which isanother just open source version
of Audible.
And it also has this fun featurethat lets you treat audiobooks
like podcasts. So you can have,like, RSS feeds of audiobooks
that make them all the chaptersappear as different files as if
they're, like, in a podcast,which is very cool. And the last
(23:13):
one is an open sourcealternative to, like, Netflix or
Disney plus called Jellyfin,which is just a streaming
service to watch home homevideos or legally acquired
movies and TV. And the entirecomputer, I also use as, like, a
NAS, a network attached storagedevice so that my wife and I can
(23:36):
back up our computers and that Ican access all of my, like,
swathes of video files and nothave to pay Google a gazillion
dollars to back up all thatstuff for me.
Audrey Evans (23:47):
Beautiful. I'm so proud of you. I just met you,
but I'm proud. I'm proud of
Drew Lyton (23:51):
you. Thanks.
Audrey Evans (23:55):
Do you remember the first time you turned it on
and it worked?
Drew Lyton (24:00):
I remember so the first time that I booted
everything up after installingall the hardware is always like
a scary time. Because whenyou're sitting in a room with
the side panel off of adecommissioned server that's ten
or twelve years old, and youbought it on eBay and you have
(24:22):
no idea how well someone tookcare of this thing. And then
you've sat there with all ofyour random woodworking tools to
try to precisely install a bunchof 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 doessome horrible beep because
(24:43):
computer manufacturers don'tcare how you feel when you turn
on a computer, and you don'tknow whether that beep was good
or bad.
Right. But it turns out to begood and it just shows up on
your display and you can startinstalling software, that's that
is a magic moment. Because atleast for me, someone that sits
on the software side oftechnical stuff, the being done
(25:05):
with the hardware aspect isalways a really nice feeling.
The first time that I actuallybooted up the applications,
which I did in stages. Right?
Like, I started with Calibre,installing this application that
I had never run before. And alsowith the added complexity of,
like, it's sitting on a computerthat doesn't have a monitor
(25:28):
because it's a server. That wascool to see it appear in my
browser and, like, be able tolog in and start setting this
up. Exciting moment. The secondexciting moment was when I did
the giant library dump fromGoogle where I downloaded our
entire Google Photos library,which was over three terabytes
(25:51):
of photos and videos, and ranthis crazy amazing tool that
someone in the open sourcecommunity had made that takes
your Google archive, which arethese massive, like, 50 gigabyte
zip files and pulls out all ofthe media, pulls all out all the
(26:11):
metadata, converts it tosomething that Image can read
and use, and uploads it all toits database.
And that took, I think, aroundsix hours. And then all of my
stuff appeared on my phone in away that I had not really
(26:31):
experienced before because it'slike when you move house and
you're seeing things that youknew you had but have not looked
at in a while, that was thisexperience moving everything to
a self hosted server, a digitalmove in a literal and a
figurative sense. And so you'reunpacking boxes and you're
(26:54):
trying to make sure thateverything survived the move.
And in that way, you're reexperiencing a lot of your your
digital archive.
Audrey Evans (27:01):
Beautiful. You'd be a great librarian.
Drew Lyton (27:07):
I think I'm too disorganized. But
Audrey Evans (27:09):
I don't think so. Not based on what I've heard so
far.
Drew Lyton (27:13):
Yeah. You're seeing the most pristine part of my
office. So
Audrey Evans (27:19):
Well, also the the values and the and the care that
you have in your relationship tointentionality with technology
is is very librarian coded.
Drew Lyton (27:30):
This moment of bringing everything from
Google's cloud down to my ownserver, what reminded me of
that, like, ah, this is mereally doing the work to curate,
maintain, and keep a durablebackup personal archive of my
(27:53):
stuff and, like, who I am andwho 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 hadaccess to do something like
this?
(28:14):
And almost an immediateacknowledgment that, like, this
is not the way.
Audrey Evans (28:47):
Do you feel comfortable sharing what room
you self host in?
Drew Lyton (28:53):
Yeah. So we live in not a super large townhouse. So
our computer, our self hostedserver is actually right next to
our couch in our living room.
Audrey Evans (29:09):
Can you hear it?
Drew Lyton (29:10):
Fortunately, you cannot hear it, really. There's,
like, a little bit of hummingand, like, beeps and boops, you
know, like, of a normal oldcomputer that's kind of running
in your house, but not nearly asbad as I thought it would be,
which was also part of therequirement for me and my wife
is that we want this. We wantour home to not feel like a data
(29:31):
center. Yeah. Yeah.
Big part of it. Exactly. Interms of location, it made the
most sense to put it in ourliving room mostly because
that's where our Wi Fi routerrouter is. So
Audrey Evans (29:43):
I love knowing painting the picture of of what
does this actually look and feellike to do something like this
in your actual home. And thatyou you see it, you interact
with it as an object constantly.
Drew Lyton (29:56):
And not yeah. And to color that even more. So the
computer that is running all ofour services that is sitting in
our living room, like, justchugging 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 thecouch. Like, this is a real
piece of technology that existsalmost as decor, as useful
(30:19):
furniture in in the physicalrealm as much as in the digital.
Audrey Evans (30:24):
Is there, like, a particular day in the life of
hosting your own server that youthat is an interesting day?
Drew Lyton (30:31):
So in the day to day, I think that it's set up
well enough that I don't thinkabout it. Like, I have image on
my phone and it looks I'mlooking at it right now and it
looks identical to GooglePhotos. It's currently backing
up all the photos that I took,like, a few minutes ago. And so
in general, I think it's prettyhands off where on the non
(30:54):
normal days where I I do have tothink about it, the day to day
experience is me going into theterminal, SSH ing into my
server, and reading logs of the,like, Docker files that are
running and trying to figure outwhy something broke, what went
wrong, looking at memory usagegraphs, looking at CPU spikes,
(31:16):
trying to understand whyrandomly my graphics card
disconnected from the entireLinux container, you know. But
that stuff is pretty few and farbetween now.
It's both much more stable andmuch less stable than I think I
thought at the beginning, likein different ways.
Audrey Evans (31:34):
Okay. Yeah. So how does this self hosted experience
feel compared to your rentedcloud experience?
Drew Lyton (31:46):
All in all, I think that these open source
alternatives provide a prettygood one to one to cloud based
options. A lot of them don'thave as clean or as modern of a
UI as you might want. But thingslike image and jellyfin, I'd say
are as good, if not better, UIexperiences. And a lot of that
(32:08):
has to do with the great work ofthe open source maintainers who
put in all of the effort to notonly make these run well on a
lot of different types ofhardware, but also put in a lot
of time and effort into makingthe experience a good one where
you would wouldn't miss theniceties of having a team of 400
(32:30):
people at Google who spend everywaking moment trying to get you
to use Google Photos.
Audrey Evans (32:35):
Right. Do you think this is a sustainable
choice for you and your wife andand your imminently to be born
new child.
Drew Lyton (32:47):
Yeah.
Audrey Evans (32:47):
Yeah. Have you learned anything about your
relationship throughcollaborating and working Oh. In
this way together?
Drew Lyton (32:54):
I think we've definitely learned that we're
hoarders. Like, I I think theexperience of having to have on
a hard drive in your home all ofyour important files, documents,
everything is both, like,exciting and also an
(33:22):
acknowledgment of, like, thereare only so many resources and
do we really need this videothat I shot when I was, like, 18
of me running home from from,like, getting groceries or
whatever. Like like, there is alot of, I think, feelings of
less separation in terms of ourrelationship to, like, digital
(33:47):
files and goods being feelingmore physical and having a cost,
which is, I think, something wedidn't really think of before.
And also means we have to haveconversations together about
similar to how you have to haveconversations with your partner
about, like, we only have somuch closet space, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe it's time for us todeclutter. Like, you have to
(34:08):
have that now with your digitallife Yeah. In a way that you
kind of don't when the thesolution is just to throw more
money at the problem.
Audrey Evans (34:18):
Yeah. Exactly. Pay for
Drew Lyton (34:19):
more storage.
Audrey Evans (34:19):
Sometimes friction in relationship can surface
values and opportunities.
Drew Lyton (34:24):
Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And there are very new
conversations we're having aboutwho is in charge of curating the
digital closet. A new chore thatdidn't exist before we had a
humming, you know, piece offurniture that stores all of our
digital life.
Audrey Evans (34:43):
I love this. Well, maybe we'll have to do a part
two with your wife at somepoint. And the new baby and see
follow-up with you in six monthsand see how it's all going.
Drew Lyton (34:55):
Yeah. There is a conversation we've been having
about how does this new, like,piece of furniture, this new
appliance, this tool we haveaffect, if at all, our kids'
relationship with a computer?And what does this new tool
enable us to do in terms of kindof curating and guiding their
(35:16):
experience through the earlystages of learning about the
Internet, where we now have ourown little Internet that is,
like, more safe. Right? And,like, private and controlled by
us.
And what does that enable us todo in terms of teaching and
learning about how to use thesetools?
Audrey Evans (35:38):
Did building your own cloud in your house, did it
feel like a radical act?
Drew Lyton (35:47):
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. Andsometimes that makes you feel
like a pioneer. In this case, itmade me feel slightly, like,
(36:08):
crazy. Like, there has to be areason that I don't know anyone
else that is doing this. Yeah.
You know, not to spoil it toomuch, but there was something. I
was like, this was this was nota trivial thing to do. Yeah.
Audrey Evans (36:22):
Why do you speculate you don't know anyone
else doing this?
Drew Lyton (36:26):
I think there's a lot of reasons that people don't
self host ubiquitously. One ofthem is, for most people, it's
technically inaccessible.Convincing some people I know in
my life to build a computerwould be very hard. To convince
them to build a computer thatwill run hypervisor software, to
(36:49):
run Linux containers withDocker, and have a VPN setup
with Tailscale, that seemsimpossible.
Audrey Evans (37:02):
Even as a person who is wants to do all of those
things, the learning curve feelsextreme.
Drew Lyton (37:10):
Yeah. I I think so that that's a big part of it. I
think the technicalinaccessibility is probably 80%
of why we don't see more peopledoing this. I think the other
20% is cost.
Audrey Evans (37:26):
Okay. Say more.
Drew Lyton (37:28):
It wasn't cheap to do this. And I did it on a
pretty low budget in comparisonto some people in this
community. I bought a twelveyear old decommissioned server
off of eBay for around $330 thathad, like, a ton of RAM and a
(37:51):
relatively fine CPU. I spentclose to, I think, $800 on hard
drives. Now you don't have to dothat, but I did that because I
have a lot of video files that Iwanted to store.
I bought stuff that you probablywouldn't ever need, like a
(38:12):
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. Andobviously, like, I'm a tech
person and so I had a lot ofthis stuff lying around from
other projects. But even if youjust take the base computer,
(38:32):
like investing $400 in somethingis not an like a no brainer
decision, especially when you'recomparing it to the cost of a
hosted cloud solution, whichcosts $12 a month.
Audrey Evans (38:46):
Yeah. Do you think that people should be doing
this? Like, in general, as ageneral approach to is this the
sort of way forward?
Drew Lyton (38:57):
Mhmm. I think a world in which everyone is able
to self host all of their ownversions of applications and
have, like, complete backups oftheir digital lives, own their
own data, all of theseidealistic ways of using and
(39:18):
experiencing the Internet andmaking it personal. I think that
vision and that underlyingemotion of, like, both freedom
and control totally vibe withme. That's why I did this thing.
And yet, I think that this isnot something I would recommend
(39:39):
to most people nor is a futurethat I think I personally am
going to fight for.
And the reason is that I thinkthat it creates a kind of
suburban Internet wherealongside your lawnmower and
your car, you have a server thatyou have to maintain and take
(40:00):
care of. I think that that's areally inefficient use of
resources, is technicallyinaccessible for most people,
and gets rid of a lot of thegreat stuff about the cloud.
Audrey Evans (40:17):
Yes.
Drew Lyton (40:17):
The cloud is this, like, abstraction away from this
very complicated thing offiguring out how do I connect
myself to data and informationand files that are backed up and
distributed and cached and allthese things that make it super
(40:41):
fast and simple and easy to do.That infrastructure is really a
feat of engineering and issomething that we really benefit
from and shouldn't be arequirement for everyone to try
to recreate for themselves.Yeah. I think, like, one of the
fundamental problems with thisvision of a completely self
(41:06):
hosted future is that it assumesthat isolated independent
systems are virtuous. But,really, isolated independent
systems are really inconvenient.
Like, self hosting is, yeah,like, personalized and private
(41:29):
and individual. But how then arewe supposed to be able to have,
like, photo albums that areshared amongst you and me if
both of ours, like, the theamount of technological
infrastructure we would have tocreate and that I'm I know
people in this community areworking on with, like, peer to
(41:52):
peer networking and distributed,like like, protocols, that all
seems cool. And, also, I thinkthe easier and maybe more long
term beneficial approach is thatrather than us all owning our
own clouds, we should just ownthe cloud.
Audrey Evans (42:12):
Yeah. So that's my that's my exact question for you
is if we don't want to pay acorporate entity to, you know,
rent cloud storage and buildingour own personal cloud is maybe
not an option or even adesirable future as you've
listed out for us reasons whynot. Could you talk us through
(42:34):
another vision of maybe buildinga communal shared Internet
infrastructure? What would acommunity hosted cloud look
like? How would it work?
What would need to happen for usto get there?
Drew Lyton (42:47):
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, youalso get access to, like, a 100
gigabytes of file storage andaccess to a, like, publicly
hosted, like, photo sharingplatform, Google Drive
(43:11):
alternative, that that visionseems unattainable until you
realize that many corporations,nonprofit organizations,
schools, all already providethat to their constituents. This
idea that having some sort ofpublic infrastructure to be able
(43:35):
to provide services on theInternet 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 myhouse to have my wife and I be
able to back up our photos,access our media. This is the
(43:56):
same system that could be usedamongst a community of people to
have one or multiple servers oreven set up hosted solutions in
current data centerinfrastructure to be able to
provide that to thousands ofpeople instead of two.
I don't think that that's crazy.
Audrey Evans (44:15):
It's not. It's not crazy at all. And it might be
something that we need one day.
Drew Lyton (44:21):
Yeah. And even so I wrote an article talking about
this experience, and someonereached out to me saying, hey. I
live in Arizona, and I'm doingthis. I am building public
infrastructure for my town inArizona and trying to work with
(44:43):
my local municipality and thelibrary to make this not, like,
only marketed, but actually wellestablished and sustainable. And
his experience was that the hardpart is not the tech.
The hard part is convincingcommunities that the tech bros
(45:06):
could actually provide a goodpublic service to them. There is
so much distrust around peoplethat provide technology to us
right now that the notion thatthe tools that are currently
used by the lords to lord overus, the serfs, could be
(45:30):
accessible to them in a waythat's co owned and cooperative
seems outlandish and, like, thatit's got to be a scam.
Audrey Evans (45:42):
And maybe that's the work that has to be done to
bring those communities into theprocess.
Drew Lyton (45:48):
I think that that is totally the work to be done. It
is not we have solved thetechnical problems. The open
source community, the selfhosted community, they've done
it. And now I think it is thework of us as technologists and
people that are passionate aboutproviding this to our
(46:09):
communities to do the socialwork, to repair trust, and to
actually build connections andrelationships that allow a more
community hosted and communalInternet to something that makes
you really feel empowered andconnected to your community and
(46:32):
that this is co owned andshared.
Audrey Evans (46:33):
I'm literally crying right now.
Drew Lyton (46:35):
No. And that's all stuff that the Internet was
meant to be. Right? Like, thisis the original vision of the
Internet. Yeah.
So there's just a lot of work todo.
Audrey Evans (46:44):
Yeah. Are you suggesting we feel hopeful about
the Internet?
Drew Lyton (46:51):
I don't know. With all of the wackadoo stuff
happening with AI and whether ornot the Internet, you know, like
dead Internet theory and allthis stuff, I do feel like it's
hard to have hope. But I reallydo believe in this, like,
counter cultural idea of thealive Internet theory where
these are places that we liveand work. These are
(47:15):
fundamentally public socialspaces. And we, for thousands of
years, have both struggled andfigured out how to do public
spaces pretty well.
And it's just about leveragingall of that historical knowledge
and tapping into the people thatalready have that information to
(47:38):
make that happen, to make theInternet really feel alive and
like ours again.
Audrey Evans (47:56):
Drew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
your This experience with was somuch fun for me. I learned so
much. If people wanna find youonline, where can they find you?
Drew Lyton (48:09):
Yeah. So I can be found mostly only these days at
drewlighton.com. That'sdrewlyton.com. I post a
newsletter semi frequently withstories like this. So, yeah, if
people enjoyed hearing me talkabout this, maybe you'll enjoy
(48:30):
reading words I've written aboutit.
Hans Buetow (49:09):
Five. I'll throw five this time. That that way
you run out of rocks reallyquickly.
(49:40):
Whoo. Starting to lose feelingin my fingers.
(50:07):
That's awesome. And then ifyou're lucky, the ice, the sun
will heat up the rocks. Therocks will melt through the ice,
and you won't run into them whenyou're skating. Well, that was a
lot of fun. That's the secret ofthe lake.
(50:29):
Only one day of the year or onlyeach time that it freezes,
freshly frozen, the same daythat it freezes, it makes that
really resonant sound as youskip the rocks as they get
further and further out.
Amy (50:54):
That sun is warm though.
Hans Buetow (50:57):
It helps.
Mike Rugnetta (51:08):
That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the mainfeed on Wednesday, December 10.
Never post is made each andevery two weeks by a team of six
producers researching, writing,interviewing, editing, mixing,
and scoring, and designing theirhearts out. If you appreciate
the work that we do and wouldlike to help us continue to do
(51:29):
it, please consider becoming amember for $4, $4, or $4 a month
at neverpo.st today. NeverPost's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and themysterious doctor first name,
(51:52):
last name.
Our senior producer is HansButo. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer, and the show'shost, that's me, is Mike
Rignetta. Trespasser, a highstone wall. I continue to
obsessively study improving yourhurdle technique online. The red
(52:16):
curve of the track guiding fromthe right to the left of the
image as drills, minidisciplines are suggested over
and over.
I was young when I heardrecounted to me the terror and
excitement of being chased offfarmland, thinking there was a
gun scaling over to escape withsuperhuman force. Even then, I
(52:39):
wanted to be part of the chase.Excerpt of The Blank Jumped Over
the Blank Along a Line a Leap aLanding by Rowan Powell.
Neverpost is a production ofCharts and Leisure and is
distributed by Radiotopia.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.