 All right. So thanks everybody who could make it to the July community chat. Recalling this one tools that seem out of reach. And it's maybe not an amazing name to be honest. I think really what I wanted to kind of talk about, see if people would bring things to table about is just what's an app, something you're wanting to do or an application you want to run that you're either interested in and it does seem out of reach or maybe is just one that you have yet to look into. Obviously, yeah, edge cases and high bars. So something that maybe is filling a niche or something that you're like, I want to replace this with something else that I can control or sell posts or something like that. Obviously, it's something that you think a lot about it reclaim, but and I have a literal endless list of tools that I want to look into and try to rod and see like what do they do? What are they good for? What's the advantages? What's the downside? What kind of server infrastructure do you need? That kind of thing. So, but and I can share a couple of those as we go, I'm really curious about obviously what you all may have ideas that you're looking to. I've always wanted to try to find an alternative to this thing or I've found my alternative, but I don't know how to run it or I haven't taken the time. I will say that it just as an example real quick. I've messed around with this tool called chasm workspaces a little bit and I did blog about it a little bit. And basically it's it allows you run like desktop applications in a web browser and you can host it in Docker. So if you've ever used like a desktop as a service type thing, like if like a lot of IT departments will deploy like Citrix and like VMware for this kind of thing. It's like that, but way smaller scale. And you can do really cool things with it like collaboratively use an application that doesn't normally work that way. Like you could collaboratively use a single web browser or or GIMP or fit for photo editing and stuff like that. I ran Doom in it and collaboratively playing Doom was something I tried with a friend and it didn't work very well as you can imagine and both of us using the keyboard at the same time, but it was neat that it worked at all. So that's one I'm interested in. I don't know how practical it is, but I think the technology is really interesting. And maybe another one that I think is more potentially more practical but I haven't tried it all and there's a whole genre of these things that I have on my list is alternatives to things like like white space, sorry, white boarding tools, like a shared online kind of space where people can share links and draw things. There's tons of tools that do this, but there aren't a lot of good self-hosted tools that do this. And I've actually had more than one person ask me about like what would you use as an alternative to say like Google Jamboard or Padlet or something like that. And some of them exist. This one I messed around with and did get working, but it's like an open source skeleton left after a company, a startup died, so I don't know that I would necessarily recommend people invest a lot of time in it because I don't know if it'll ever get updates called Space Deck. And I've played with a couple others, maybe a little bit more practical, a version of what I was talking about in Chasm. But yeah, I mean, is there use cases, tools that people are looking at? I will say selfishly, I've got a note open, so if there are things I'm going to take notes because I'm always looking for stuff to try. But curious to see if people have things that contribute on that. And I saw your question, is Space Deck require a paid license? It did, but the company open sourced it when they went out of business. So now you have to, there's no paid version of Space Deck anymore, you have to host it yourself. But like I said, it doesn't, it's an example and it does work when I tried it, but like the question is how long? Because I don't know that anybody's updating it. Theoretically, someone could because it's open source, but I'm not sure if there's a community behind it. So that's one I found recently. I did get it running on Reclaim Cloud, but I had to use like an older version of Node and stuff to do it. So another one that I'm kind of interested in and trying is called Base Row. And it's kind of like, there is a paid version of this one, but it's also self-hostable through it in the chat. It's a, there's a lot of things like it now, but it's kind of in the vein of like modern Microsoft access. Like AirTable is one of those where it's a no-code database. You can do basically spreadsheet things, but then all kinds of database type stuff with it. And I've used AirTable before, but to do a lot, you need to go up their pricing tiers pretty quickly sometimes. So I've always been interested in trying Base Row, but I haven't gotten around to it. I mean, like I've got like a Heroku server that runs a Node thing to allow our Slack stuff to talk to a WordPress site. Sure. I don't know that that means anything particularly special, but it just does feel like a chunk of that Node realm is going to be a place where I don't know a lot of fun stuff is happening. And just trying to figure out a way to make it easier and more manageable, but also like, you know, it's Heroku is not, not hard on the wallet right now, which is, you know, like I can run it there for free at the moment. But it also comes at a cost. Like sometimes it takes it a second to wake up. So I don't know when you're trying to think through things like that, but balancing, I guess, convenience versus cost in the Node space will be an interesting one for me. Yeah, that's always a balance, right? And cost and how much time you want to spend maintaining it. The Node is so tricky. Like I am, as someone who hasn't done a lot of actual like programming, I've done like one tiny project in Node, and I did it enough to understand what I had to do and about that's it. And like dependency management and stuff like that and Node is really tricky. So I can kind of see why really no one offers it in a shared hosting space because everything is like containerized with Node because of that dependency story. And you have to have many, many versions of it installed if you're running many, many different applications. So it gets really tricky really quickly. And there's security concerns there too. So I've done a little bit of that stuff in Reclaim Cloud. And I have done, and it's been a long time since I used Heroku, but the tricky thing I have with that kind of stuff is I feel like when you have to do something in a non, like when you have something that's like we can run on Heroku, you do these three steps. I always kind of come out of that conversation not understanding what I've done on their infrastructure because you don't really get access to the server in all cases, right? But I can see how that will go the opposite way. I'm a little bit more comfortable when I have a command line to use because I know some things there, but that's not the case for everybody, obviously. Some people will find that more comfortable. I don't have a tool that does this. So if anyone has recommendations, I would love to hear them. But I really want something that will let me visualize clue boards or maybe they're called conspiracy boards. They're just, you know, you, you tack stuff up and you connect it all with the red string and then share them with other people. Like, and that they can edit and modify preferably in real time, which is where it starts getting extra tricky. But the ability to do that sort of remote collaboration of just sticking everything up and then connecting it in ways that look promising is something that I've not been able to find that it would be really, really useful. So would that be in the vein of kind of like what I was sharing the space deck or maybe like a padlet where you can kind of have a spatial, like literally like draw. And I mean, obviously you're looking for something very specific, but I'm pulling them up now. Like, I think I get the real life analog, right? Yeah, string and yarn stuff. There's some stuff, like there's some stuff that sort of does it and then I'm not padlet looks promising. I would, I would want a space. Okay. So then those actually do sound like they would work. I just need to figure out how collaboration would be. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. No, I feel kind of silly. Well, no. Well, and to be fair, like that's, that's kind of what this is for, right? Like, because like pad, padlet is a nut. You can't self-host that it's a free with, they actually have a pretty good free plan. And but I've had a few people ask about like a self-hosted alternative to that. And that's where I kind of come up short. I did share space deck here, but like it's not easy to get set up. And it does. I'm not sure that there's a continued development story. So, you know, that's a tricky one. And there's some alternatives, but I haven't found one that like is compelling enough for me to put a lot of time in the trying to understand it yet. So the string theory stuff is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. This is cool. And great examples of exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking about. Actually, I'm rewatching the wire right now with my son. And there is a whole thing where they have a pin board where they're stringing together the investments. And I guess now looking at that pin board, it's like that's narrative string theory, I think in the wire. So it's all connected. A totally, totally impractical one that I haven't spent time with yet is I really want to self-host a multi-user dungeon, a mud. Kind of in the like computer history curiosity corner essentially in my head because I just find that interesting. And I found one that runs inside of, sorry, that interfaces with Discord. So you have to host it, but then you can hook it up to a Discord channel and people can, you know, interact with it that way instead of via a terminal. And I, it's silly and stupid, but I think it's really interesting. And it runs in Python. So I would have to do that in probably Reclaim Cloud and it looks not too bad to run, but it, again, it like was updated a couple of years ago last, so I'm not really sure what the story is there. And this is obviously not something that there's like money behind driving the development. So, but I find belief interesting. I've been, I've been watching a chunk of a booming note taking space that's kind of taken off. And a lot of it out of Mike Coffield's, or at least the theory of Mike Coffield work, you know, seven years ago almost. But there's a bunch of, most of it is private first, and very little of it is actively online invisible, but I've seen some, you know, there's some tools like obsidian and realm research. There's some paid ones, obviously the older Evernote and OneDrive or OneNote flavors. But I have seen a handful of people doing a lot of dungeons and dragons work within obsidian as world building to then go from there, which Taylor I'm sure will go down a deep rabbit hole. But more on topics for here and us. Obsidian portal? Obsidian.MD is a website. It's essentially it's a, a marked that most of them typically are marked down interfaces or editors. And you're saving all your notes as individual files in a folder, usually locally. But I think it would be super cool if, and there are some people who are nibbling at it in terms of creating interactive communities built on these things, because you're taking files that, you know, have sync, syncability. And this kind of dovetails a little bit with the kind of digital garden space. But I have yet to see, I've yet to see it kind of break into the kind of more mainstream education space. But because a lot of the people using it are using it for educational purposes, it's just hidden under the surface. So you don't see it online. I think there are some, there need to be some easier ways to take these things and host them or self host them online. So you could say, you know, point to a website and say, here's my notes on all these topics. I'll pick up a link in a second, but they're, you know, there's obviously a rich history of academics. Wendy Treadian comes to mind quickly, who she's got a huge media wiki wiki that goes back, you know, 15 years or more. And it's a huge wealth of resource, both for a teaching as well as for our own research. So that pattern exists, but a lot of these tools are making it a lot easier to really quickly write and do things online. But that as a self hosted thing would be really great. And I've seen people kind of experimenting in the space of like, you know, static site hosting to do it. I've yet to see something that's, you know, the tech hurdle is low enough you can kind of do a one button click and here you go. But I would imagine in the next two years we're going to see more of that stuff as people play with it further. Yeah, I'm obsidian is awesome. I have, I am a note taking traveler. My notes never stay in one tool for very long. But most recently it's been obsidian. I really like it. I do know they have a paid service that will host a vault for you. I don't remember how much it is though. I think it's if I remember correctly it was kind of expensive. It was like 10 or $15 a month. 16. Okay. Yeah. So that's, you know, easy but kind of expensive. I think especially for the value for a lot of people, certainly myself included and you touched on it right at the end there, but I did link to a project that lets you convert an obsidian vault to a Hugo site. I haven't used it, but I've seen a couple of those out there and yeah, certainly not. That's on the more technical end of it. But you know, I could see someone taking a project like this obsidian, the Hugo thing and making it kind of a one click thing and saying like, look, what you need is a hosting space and an FTP client. You run my program and then you drag your files, you know, or something like that could be, could be doable. And especially with Hugo itself, that's what I use around my blog and it, it, it runs anywhere. So you could even theoretically do all of that in the shared hosting space. There's nothing about as long as your conversion tool worked in that same space. And in this case, this one was running Python. So it wouldn't work on our servers. It would work in like a reclaimed cloud or something like that, but it's possible. Like I, I agree. It, it's interesting to me as well. And I think it's one of those things that obsidian has gotten so big so quickly. Like I think I heard about it like maybe a year or two ago and now it feel like I see it everywhere. I mean, I know a few people that use it even though it's pretty, you know, it's like catering to a very specific type of person, I think who wants to take notes in a certain way. So I think there's a good chance that we'll see movement in that space and making the tools more accessible soon. But I'm going to keep my eye on it because I find it really interesting too. The nice part too is it's not even, I saw somebody make a mention of Markdown and not being a thing in there. Most of these things actually are just raw text base. So you don't even have to touch into Markdown or HTML even. So it, it becomes even more accessible as kind of a base layer, one layer down, especially if you're approaching students who are not as technically literate. And that's the best thing about Markdown is you can start from nothing and build, you know, on it and go, oh, I can do this and it now if you want to. I love that. And I love that in Markdown. You can also, if you really want to, you can just write HTML in there if that's what you want to do and it will work. That's really cool. Especially if you want to get fancy and publish notes, but there's, yeah. But you don't have to go there. That conversation just kind of got me thinking back to the previous question about the conspiracy board. And one thing that's an open source tool that you might want to check out that somehow the Markdown and that sort of thing got stuck in my head is twinary. And I don't know, like I use it for, for mapping out branching scenarios because you can just do Markdown and build all of these cards automatically. And then you can link to stuff when you run it as HTML, but the authoring interface actually looks a lot like that conspiracy map. I don't know off the top of my head if you can have more than one person in there at the same time, but you are able to self-host, self-host. Cool. I've worked with Twine a bit before, but always as a tool for interactive fiction. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of finding the tool and kind of bending it to something that I wasn't really meant for. It might be worth checking out one out. That's cool. I hadn't thought of that. Thank you. I just talked a little bit about this, but while we're talking about wikis and this kind of throw back to Mike Crawfield in the smallest federer Wickeny. I was, someone wrote a ticket in to reclaim them. It was like, hey, I want to play with this tool called Bookstack, I think, which I had not heard about. I was like, again, with the Reclaim Cloud, and it was done in PHP Laravel, so there were enough weird packages that I wouldn't run in their domain of one's own instance, so that I got it up and running in Reclaim Cloud in about five minutes, but what was interesting about it is it's like the most popular wiki application in GitHub right now that I'd never heard of that is basically, for documentation, for maybe note taking, again, I'm not a note taker at all, so everything goes on my blog, so there's no organization to anything, but it was interesting because it was a wiki application that says it was in the docu wiki spirit, which is where Mike Crawfield's early experiment started, but it's a lot simpler than something like MediaWiki, where it went the route of the programmer knows best and we're not going to make this usable for anybody ever, and it's going to suck to update, and it's going to suck to use plugins, and there's going to be no wissy wig. They really screwed themselves in that regard, but this supposedly is a very elegant wiki solution for people who want to write documentation or organize stuff, and it runs in Reclaim Cloud really easily, which I was happy to see, but anyway, throw that on to the wiki discussion. If you look at smallest federated wiki, as you mentioned to Chris, and that docker kind of stub is just, they're like, don't run this for real there. You should probably spin up a server in, I think, Node and just run these commands, so that would be a Node server and then run those commands, and I imagine given they're porting everything, it wouldn't be too bad to actually get smallest federated wiki up, should you want to go that route. Fed wiki. I don't remember who recommended Tiddly wiki, but I've been digging into it and it looks like they have a concept map option as well, so. That's it, JR. That's the book stack. I'm sorry, pilot. No, that's it. That was the whole thing. Tiddly wiki. That's like, I remember that, right? Yes. I think. Tiddly wiki I think is, they're up to almost 20 years old, but there is a huge community still around it and actively using it. The problem I think for it on the web, for me at least is it's a, it falls under the JavaScript didn't read format. So it's literally so heavy in the JavaScript that you can't curl it and you can't do a lot of easy web native things with it. But the nice part is it's kind of a card based thing and I kind of even early pieces go back to hypercard. But you can create a string of links and there are even plugins now too that have become big. And I think one of the reasons it's having a resurgence now is they've built in automatic backlinks to things within the product. So you can cross the link and create a story and have a stream of cards that you can save it and create a URL to here's what this one story looks like and compare it to other stories. So you can have chains of cards kind of going down telling a full story or narrative or even a choose your own adventure type thing, which is a really cool little thing, but it's nice that you can serve it in small instance or let's say, you know, let's say Taylor had a version of Kidly Wiki up on the web, I can do a one click download and save all the notes he's ever taken and have copies of those for myself or just drag and drop an individual card from his collection into my collection. And it's, you know, it so it does a lot of those things that FedWiki is doing, but it does it in an even easier drag and drop fashion. So, but I, you know, the problem is it's not an easy thing to kind of self post. You got to really dig into some leads to get it up and running at least privately. So that seems to be the case with FedWiki too, given like even on Docker hub, I'm not finding an instance of FedWiki, which I think is crazy to think about, but I'm not, I'm not seeing any instance of it. Maybe it's because that's where I would go if anyone said, oh, I can't run this. It's like has someone done a doc for instance for it. FedWiki looks like they have a list of options, maybe right here, but I'm not 100% sure I'm still sort of digging through their site. And now I've immediately lost the tab that's from. Some of it you may actually find more if you look at Ward Cunningham's version of FedWiki or his particular instance. I'm sure they're kind of their corporate version has a bunch of stuff, but his is probably more up to date and has more resources. Has smallest FedWiki gone corporate? Has it gotten to that point? I couldn't even figure it out when it was not corporate. Yeah, you can't, you can't, it's hard to find it. And you don't see a Docker instance because it's so not corporate. And that's why that's part of the problem is it's a bunch of individuals who are donating their time to build it and put the things together and using it for their own purposes. And nobody is using it with Docker to spin up 500 instances. So those types of tools don't exist yet because it's a community driven. Yeah. No, it's, I mean, it's interesting though, because I think tools like Obsidian seemingly are doing a lot of what you said FedWiki are doing. But the problem with FedWiki, even when we were trying to get it up and running for folks is it's not easy to get it to spin up. And a Docker image would probably help that community, you know, because it's even you need technical skills to do the Docker piece of it. But at least it would get over some of the kind of, you know, particular requirements for that server stack. That's no JS, which could be its own kind of, you know, nightmare. So that's what we ran into when we were doing that with Mike Clawfield on early reclaim hosting servers, like trying to get it run for folks. It was like, ah, it's a little bit out of our, you know, comfort zone. Well, they do have a nice enough. I think they still do weekly or at least monthly zoom calls. And I imagine if somebody gets their toe into there, you could probably Tom Sawyer them into putting that up as a means of spreading it further and wider. Yeah, I'm telling you, I think I did a lot with media wiki earlier on, but for me, the wiki kind of with that experience. I don't know. I lost a little bit of my of my enthusiasm for it in that regard. Well, it's been a bit since I've used it, but I think doc you wiki does a better job of being approachable. Maybe not for the main person that runs it. Like there's still kind of a lot of weird stuff you have to get into. But like I had supported a few teachers who done wiki stuff and one of them did media wiki and based on that experience, unless the objective was for their students to learn how media wiki worked. I usually pointed them to doc you wiki because it was a little bit easier for students to use. Yeah, to me, that's what a lot of these kind of note taking softwares that are built on either text files or markdown files are way more accessible as you can. The level of technology goes way down, but at the same time, it's not, you know, it's not widespread enough on the web yet. We're easy enough to get it on the web, but it's way easier for students to adopt it and make the content for it. And the functionality you can get out of just, you know, putting a word into double brackets in a media wiki type way is, you know, really phenomenal. And then on top of that, there's a lot of, I think it's Zolt is fun. I want to say it's Z S BOLT is his name, but he does some fun visualization software that creates kind of mind maps of what all your interlinked notes look like. So after you've been doing it a while, you have this massive, you know, little galaxy of all these interlinked ideas. But that's another kind of technical layer on top that, you know, is somebody will crack it and all this stuff will be online, but, you know, being able to easily share notes, either kind of privately or in small groups for classroom use to me as, you know, just supreme gravy. Yeah. It's like, I know they talk about Ted Nelson, Xanadu. And my quality would a lot too when talking about that vision of note linking and the web. So I think it's super interesting, you know, in that regard. What else? I mean, like, does anyone have an application they, they would run? Okay. Considering smalls federic and fed wiki probably we could do that with an npm. I might even test it, but any other things that people would want to run as a test. I'd be interested. I've never done anything with Clowder, but someone reached out in a ticket and asked when we were going to get it up for up and running for shared hosting. It was, it was, it was a rhetorical question. They didn't, they were, we were having a different discussion. They were like, Hey, you should, you guys should look into Clowder. And I looked into it and it, there's no way it's going to run in shared hosting, but it would probably run on reclaimed cloud because it has Docker functionality. It is a big open source data management option. But how do you spell it? Like Chowder, but with an L, I put it in the chat. And the main thing is, I feel like I don't have a good enough data set to make spinning up a version of it useful. Like I don't know how I would experiment with it, but I'm curious about what it could do. That's interesting. I think I'd have to first wrap my head around what this does. Like I, I was listening to you describe it. I was listening at the webpage and I'm still kind of like, Uh, I also don't really know what it does. Like I'm getting some of it, but I'm not. Some of these things are hard to like place in your personal ecosystem. You know what I mean? Yeah. They, they do allow for a demo. Like you can make an account on the site and set stuff up and play with it. And then I think apparently they will trash your stuff. Uh, periodically whenever, because it's just a demo. Um, but just for playing around. It could be useful. And they also say like, please back up your work. You can use it somewhere else. Like don't let us be the only copy you have. Um, I'll throw this in the chat too. This is a tool called, I don't know how to pronounce this. I don't know, but it's a, um, I've played around with it, but I want to spend more time and get it working in a way that I'm looking for. But basically it's a self hostable search engine. But not really in the way that like, like you're not, you're not Google, you're not indexing pages. You can use it to sort of as a front end to do web searching, of course. But the thing that's interesting to me is you can apparently pretty easily kind of add your own custom searches to it. And what I kind of want to do is have like a Taylor search engine for my own purposes that really only I use that would do web searching, but also search like some common places and put them basically as facets. So, so like what you can do just like when you do a web search on Google and you get like web images maps, you know, at the top, you can have your own things there in this tool. I think it'd be really cool to be able to search, say my notes and my website and maybe a list of like blogs that are like that I frequently would want to search through stuff like that. It's probably a lot of work to maintain it. I don't actually know. I did get spinning up. It was not actually that hard to install it, but I haven't spent enough time to learn about like what would maintaining it mean. But it is kind of interesting to me because it's sort of related to the some of the federated wiki stuff and that like ultimately for me it's to have one place I search for things. I'm doing this a little bit with Notion right now where I'm pulling in my notes and Pinboard into that tool, but I kind of want to go further because and I want it to be something that's self hostable ideally. You know, that's super cool. I've got three or four friends kind of in an indie web space who are digging at that kind of personal search or having a, you know, Google search is lovely, but it gives you too much of the world you don't have context into. But if you could search, you know, 20 of your friends wikis or websites and you have a trusted smaller search to at least delve into something, you know, that is super. It would be really valuable to be so often I'm thinking of like I've seen this, but I don't remember where and I forgot to bookmark it right like that. That's that's kind of the problem. I'm trying to solve with it and this tool I link to isn't really fully designed for that. This is a tool that's supposed to sort of replace web searching for you. But I looking at its capabilities, I think it would be possible using a tool like this, basically defining your own search engines in there and say like, yeah, let's use say Google or duck duck go, but we're going to use the site colon to search only these 30 websites, but do all of them at once, you know, that's kind of the thing I'm thinking about, but probably would take me a long time to actually do something like that. But Google does have a subset of a tool that will allow you to kind of do that. And I know a few people. There's one I use someone's custom flavored version of Marshall Kirk Patrick has a custom search built for a handful of companies that he follows. And he uses that as a custom search, but they'll let you kind of predefined places or sites that you want to throw into that pile. And it's, you know, the UI is the UI that you get. You can't customize it heavily the way it's built, but it exists as a thing at least, or at least as a model of this is what it could look like or it could be cool. I didn't even think of Google custom search. I'm like aware of that, but that would, I think do what I want. I guess I don't know enough about it. Like you have to submit things to Google custom searches like their back end tool or I don't know. I had to look more at that. But the way I recall it being set up and spent a while, like you just be able to say like search these stem sites. And then when you searched on that custom searcher, it would search that constellation of sites. So if you don't mind using Google stuff, it was pretty straightforward. I used to use it a fair amount for stuff. I don't know what, like it was free at that time. Who knows now? Will Google drop it at any moment? Possibly, you know, but it'll do like the limited stuff. Yeah. Easily. That might be a way even if like I could set that up as a proof of concept that way, even if I didn't want to stick with it forever. I don't really have a total issue with using Google. Mostly I'm trying to diversify my stuff, but like for something like this, I'd have no problems in that. Be interesting. Well, it's a, I'm a super bleeding edge, but within the note taking space stuff, there is one Google engineer in Europe. Who's got, he called, it's called an Agora.org or an Agora.org is probably the better pronunciation. But he's taking, and it's primarily based on GitHub. So if you store all of your notes as text files in GitHub and tell him to point his server at it, he can go and fetch all of your public notes and put them into kind of a broader kind of public marketplace of notes. But his online wiki is kind of a wiki of wikis. And it's built on open source software. So ostensibly you could go find the repo, and there's probably 20 people I think working on it, who are also participating in this community. But as an educator, you could have students all have separate sets of notes, your own set of notes, and then you could create kind of a wiki of wikis above it that fetch all those notes and then make them all easily searchable and interlinkable in kind of a growing brain sort of way. That would be kind of cool, but I don't know how easily self-hostable his version of that is. I haven't tinkered with it yet. I just know it exists and it's super cool. But it may be three or four years before that makes its way into a classroom space. But he's incredibly open and spends all of his free time building this thing. So it'll be supported for quite a while I think. Yeah, that's really cool. It's an interesting project. And I'll say too, it's probably one of the most incredibly diverse communities of people I've ever seen working on a piece of software. You're not going to find crazy, you know, insane, the tupperation hiding in that community, which is even better. Shannon, I am looking at the thing you said about wax and I have not heard of this, but maybe you can tell me if I'm wrong here, just reading about it a little bit. This looks like kind of like Omega, but static site version. Is that correct? Yeah, I think the idea is it's supposed to be a little more simplified, long-term kind of sustainable. The framework is just going to work probably into the future. I think that's the goal of those. Yeah, especially if it's making, it looks like it uses Jekyll to make a static site. So what you end up with is HTML and HTML is, I think, and I could be told that I don't know what I'm talking about. That's fair, but I think HTML is one of the best backwards compatible technologies we've ever come up with. So, or most backwards maybe, let's say that. It's cool. Yeah, I've never heard of that one. Yeah, the folks, I think, his name is Alex. He was at NYU. I think he's moved to Yale. I'm not sure, but he's behind that, and it's the whole minimal computing group. And Wax is something I've heard about at a CUNY thing. And I've always wanted to play with it. I think, I mean, I don't know if you can, how easy it would be to host, but that's one I'd be interested in playing with. Well, theoretically, it'd be really easy, right? Well, I guess it kind of depends. Like if you want to generate the site on your computer, then you just use FTP to upload the files, right? The trickier thing would be if you want to generate it on a server, then yeah, then you'd need whatever dependencies. Yes, you tend to sell post-hypothesis, but it's painfully difficult. And Reclaim would be super awesome if they had a one-click install version of it. Oh, I would, you know, I would freak out and jump up and down. It's way beyond my ability to sell post-hypothesis, but I know it's doable and that people do. Yeah, I mean, frankly, we haven't even looked into the, to the hypothesis integration. And I don't know if Tim and John Udall had talked at some point, because I know John has moved on to Steampyte from hypothesis, right? Yeah, but that'd be interesting. I don't really know because hypothesis, is it open source or are you again integrating in with their data? I mean, I know there was some questions around that. I think it has open and licensed. Yeah. Or open and paid, maybe. Yeah, they've got a fairly robust integration program and you can partner with them to do all kinds of crazy stuff. But if you wanted to set it up and run it on your own server, it's open source enough to allow that. They advertise that it's an open spec that runs it in terms of a, you know, there's a W3C spec. But because I don't consider that to be as open as they do because they're the one and only company that's supporting anything related to it. Yeah, maintaining it. If there were five other companies that were doing it, then it would be a lot more open at least from that perspective. But I think if we wanted to download, and there's probably four or five different pieces of software, there's the main software itself and then they have their VIA thing and then there's a couple of browser plugins. So if you still posted it, you'd probably want two or three pieces of their software stack to work well. Yeah, they've open sourced, at least on their GitHub, various parts of it. But you would need to be a company with the team of engineers probably to get that own, to turn that into something that is your own self-hostable version. Or at least it would be a lot of work, right? Because you've got a lot of the pieces and a lot of the hard parts, but it's the integrations with it all, right? Like if they've open sourced their, like, basically like the web app that is Hypothesis's website, but, you know, that just because you have the code doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to run it, you know, and then all of the little in-between parts that you probably don't have. So I think it would be pretty tricky. As indicative of how easy or not easy it is, they've got a small team, and active development on the core product is not moving at a very fast pace because most of the team they've got is supporting, keeping it up, and kind of selling service to university-level groups. So, you know, it's not... If you do, if you did do it, it wouldn't be a lot of updates because there's not a lot of core development going on because of the requirements to actually do it. So if that helps contextualize it, you know, they've got enough of their own issues to... Yeah. And once a lot of other parts that I would imagine would be almost a nightmare, like, they're... The web proxy that they do, I... Like, that would be very difficult to keep working. Like, Greg McVerry reached out to us recently on the forums, like, we should really do open-source Canvas. And, like, Canvas is one of those open-source communities. It is open-source. Sure, it's open. Good luck! Here's our sales agent when you find out that it's impossible to run through open-source. Lavya, finger guns all the way to the bank, you know? It's not really open. Hypothesis does look like it has docs on setting up your own client. They do. They do. Which doesn't necessarily make it easy, but they do outline it for you. You could do it, but you would have... You would spend a lot of time... You would never want to do it for cost reasons. Basically, you would spend more time hiring people in their time maintaining it than you would to buy it from them. Yeah. In probably most cases, anyway. But... And then there's always a little things. It's like, ah, yes, the open-source version doesn't include any of the stuff you need to, like, accept and view PDFs. It's like, oh, well, okay. That's not a good... I have no... They probably does that. I'm just saying, like, there's always little things like that. The whole grade book? New projects? Add-on. The whole... It's like, no, seriously. Like, there's huge swaths of Canvas that is like, oh, you want this? That's a pay-to-go. Yeah, Tom. I think it might be easier to implement your own Canvas in gravity forms. What's kind of... On the hypothesis part, it's probably more infrastructure and upkeep than for you to run your own version of press books. Which also is a fairly high level of upkeep and maintenance. Yeah. And Reclaim has that, right? I haven't looked in a while. I mean, you can run press books on a Reclaim server, but then it starts to get into... And this is where it starts to get like, people are like, you should run this app. And then that's like... But like, press books, like, and hypothesis, like, they have the infrastructure and hopefully the resources. Because press books, like, we got into this thing recently where it was like, there's all these dependencies, some of which are open, some of which you have to pay for, depending upon what your organization is. And those are all server-level dependencies. So it actually becomes pretty complex to get a lot of those versions of the output, like EPUBs, PDFs, MathJax, which we've run into all sorts of issues with that upgrade. And so like, it's not like, press books is super easy to get up and running. It's actually the extensions and exports or translations between these that become the real issue at the server level with dependencies. And so, you know, that's where it gets a little tricky, because then you're doing server modifications and on-shared hosting, that's super hard to do, because that could affect a whole swath of people. And then you're pushing people into the version of, well, this is managed hosting, you know, and then that's super... That's much more expensive. And then it's like, well, why don't we just do a press book server? But press books already has that, where you can run press books on their, like, shared hosting server. And they're only ever going to be able to support that better than we can, you know, their product. Yeah, it's true. And if you never, like, you realize, like, and you hate to become the IT department, but you realize sometimes why the IT department's like, no. What's all about managing? It's about managing the scope of it, right? Like, if what you want from press books is like, I want... And that's where it gets simultaneously maybe manageable and maybe not worth doing with press books is like, if you're not concerned about the add-ons, if you're not concerned about PDF, if you're not concerned about MathJax and probably other stuff I'm not thinking of, then it's like, okay, well, yeah, you could probably do that. But at that point, what you're really talking about is like, it's like WordPress with a slightly different theme and a few features built in. And so for a lot of people, they're like, well, I think I'll just do this WordPress and then manage the other parts of it a different way. That's not totally fair. There's other features a press book has, but like, it's at once, in my opinion, press book strength is that it is close to work, you know, it is built on WordPress in these core ways. But on the other hand, if you're not using a lot of the more complicated integrations, sometimes you're like, maybe this is what we're talking about, it's just a website that I built in WordPress and it's not a press book site. But not for everybody. Some people do want that. And like the network effects are cool with press books too. I'll tell you, one of the, I agree with that, Matt, Shannon, I see your question and I mean, it's kind of a transition between press books. One of the things I've liked, and it's not a hard tool to get up and running and Docker manifold, their support could be better, but it's basically you can import like a Google Doc seamlessly in and it's a really elegant basically book online. The value of that we could discuss in a different context, but like, you know, it is an elegant tool. It integrates with Google Docs. It like does a lot of that stuff seamlessly because Google Docs is a better authoring tool I think in a lot of ways than some of the others. So like that's a cool tool. And to run it, but like to your point, Shannon is like, at what point is like what we're talking about? Like it's just a dead stop for faculty. Like, yeah, great. You know, but I need a tool that works. It's easy to use. And like manifold does get there a little bit if it's up and running and supported, but like I don't see that press books like that at all. I struggle with press books. The interesting thing, Shannon, because I totally feel what you're saying. And to me like the important thing, I guess this is kind of always, but like is getting people to realize sort of like what trade-offs they are making and being comfortable with those, right? Like I use Gmail for all my email, right? And I could I go self-host my email? I guess I could do that. I don't want to. I could use a different email service. That would be easier. But right now this is the trade-off I'm making. And I always lean on the side like, if you can get people to a place where they understand what decisions they're making, that's good. And some people are going to go from there and go, okay, understanding the situation, then self-hosting is what I need and we'll go that direction. Or self-hosting is not what I need. You know, because the dynamic of power is not, just because something is self-hosted, doesn't necessarily mean you have all the control over it, right? Like if you have no ability to export your data out of a self-hosted tool, then what good is that? In a lot of cases, you know? So you do need to understand these tools and it's like, I don't know, it's more complicated than just self-hosted or not. So I loved when I got to have those conversations with people on when does it make sense to do this and not and understanding their specific situation. Obviously, you don't always have the luxury of literally sitting down and having that conversation or over email or whatever. But to me, that was always the important thing is that they, as best as I could, I get them an understanding of what they're, what they are leaving on the table and what they're not. You know, it's not always a problem that they don't have a self-hosted version. Sometimes that's good for what they need. I think sometimes looking at the spectrum of what the corporations are doing behind the scenes and even there there's a broad spectrum. So you can go to a company like Hypothesis and pay them money to do some of the managed hosting and extra services and niceties. And they're an excellent and very ethical company versus competitors that offer similar things like Peruzal which to me are some of those vile, you know, dark patterns you're ever going to find on the web. But the problem is how do you know that a company like Peruzal is doing those things behind the curtain that may not affect you now but will be a bigger issue two or three years down the line. And really that's the harder part is how do you know what those corporate ethics are? What are they doing with your data? How are they doing it? What are the long-term implications? And usually if it's a paid thing and you don't have a contract that protects you or that you even know what you need protection from, that becomes a much harder path to kind of spread your way through. Because you never know when a company is going to be bought out and what they're going to do with your data. True. So the spectrum, I just made the spectrum even wider and it got worse. Sorry. Yeah, Peruzal hypothesis is definitely, is probably a pretty good example there, right? And that was one that I dealt with when I worked at St. Norbert too. And it's getting those conversations in front of the right people but sometimes you don't always have that ability. Well, or even going on, you know, your comment there, Shannon, I know several people at several universities who are using hypothesis totally locally, they're not paying a dime for it and they're getting all the value out of it. Now they may have to spend a little more time and effort and they don't get support if they need it. But as a publicly open tool that you can sign up for, I mean, to me, most of the thing I see people getting out of that relationship is the fact that you can do a single sign-on. The student doesn't need to create an account and you can dovetail it into whatever, you know, LMS system you're using. But are those niceties things you actually need? And, you know, the nice part is that people at Hypothesis will blatantly say, yes, you can go and do this on your own and not have these things. And maybe you don't need them. In fact, a lot of the time I think not having a tie-in to the LMS is actually a good thing. So it's... And I'll tell you, Hypothesis is also extremely affordable. Like, that's the other thing for institutions. Like, the quotes I've heard from people I've talked to about that are not, like, they're not, like, coming at you and being, you know, giving you quotes that are ridiculous, like some other companies along those lines. It does depend on the scale of your project quite a bit, though. It does. But from what I've heard, it's not crazy, right? Like, it's not gougy. Yeah. Is that a word? That was one of the things that... Word. Word check. The LMS integration thing is one of the things I always push back on, like, because you get... And I can see where people get there, but I always had faculty that would be like, students are telling me that it needs to live in Moodle. That was LMS that I worked with. And I would go, yeah. But that sentence can mean a lot of things, right? One way to get content to live in Moodle is using the technology of a hyperlink, you know. And what you need to be able to do is understand how you're making, like, a digital environment for your class. And I would agree with the student that if Moodle is where we're using for courseware or LMS, whatever, you need to link from Moodle. But if you want to do something on domain of one's own or whatever, link to it. And link back, too, you know. And think critically about what the environment you're creating is and how you lead students through it, which is not as easy as it sounds in a lot of cases, I think. And then you... Now I've integrated it into the LMS. And what does that exactly mean? Now, obviously when they start talking about, like, sync and stuff, well, okay, that's different, right? But in some cases, that was successful. In some cases it wasn't, obviously. You know, you definitely always have people that are like, no, I need this textbook manufacturer because their thing does this. And it will put the links on the page for me. Okay, well, if that's what we're talking about, not being able to hyperlink to it because we can't make five hyperlinks, then that's a different conversation. Sometimes that's good to think about, too, is like, what does integration mean here? That's always a good question, too. Even in the domain of one's own side, it's how long do you support students' domains after they graduate? Or what do you do with that data? How do you deacquisition them? How do you... At least in the hypothesis, there are a few tools you can export all of your data in your notes and keep them for yourself, which is a great thing. And in fact, that's one of the things I don't like about the LMS setup is it tends to trap students' data in a place where it's not easily accessible or portable for them, at least that I'm aware of. Yeah, I mean, a lot of, obviously, our institutions are always thinking about that and helping students go through that. And luckily, like with cPanel Hosting, you do have some pretty good options for literal direct exports and imports to other, not just reclaim hosting, right? And if what you're doing is mostly in WordPress, then you have a lot, a lot of options. But getting people to understand those options is tricky because it's complicated. It just is. So it's good when you have the ability to lay those out or have place students can go to talk about it, but it's not always super straightforward, depending on what they want. And one of the things that we try and encourage during deprovisioning is for part of the communication to be around how you can take your, how you can take your data with you and you don't have to lose things when your school says, hey, we can't support you anymore. That doesn't mean that the work that you've done goes away. You still have that. Or how can you think about taking the small pieces? So I love hypothesis because it has an open backend and I can take all of my data out in real time, put it into my digital notebook as markdown files, but I can also send it to my WordPress site. So if I want an annotation to live on my website publicly, I can flip the switch and say, publish this publicly instead of privately, but then I have all my data and I don't have to worry about, I don't have to worry about, what would I replace the tool with? Not to make it boring too much, but what's weird when you're trying to think about it like institutionally, at least for me, it's like what do the different instructors expect to happen over time with this stuff? Are the annotations building up over semesters or even years? Does that matter? Do I think most of the people care about their comments on this stuff? Probably not, but the instructors might. And trying to talk these people through, what's going to happen semester by semester in this wide array of different things. Like, all right, in thing link, we delete people after X periods of inactivity. That will delete their content, delete their user account. They can reactivate at a later date, but they will have no content. But in hypothesis, on full moons, it will do this and this fourth thing. You know what I mean? Like you're just navigating so much complexity with people who have no tolerance for it. And that's where I'm struggling like big picture on these things because it's a pain in the ass even for me. Like just to try and write down for each one of these things, these are the ways we're built. These are the things we have to do. These are the repercussions of it. We are just rolling with reclaim right now, but at some point we're going to have to look at the domain of one's own thing and go like, you know, here's what we have to think about. But I don't know, it's just a mess right now because everything is so different. And that's why I was like, can I self host this? But, you know, at what cost? Yeah. It's running on Tom's laptop. He's away. He's on vacation. His laptop's asleep. Someone go open it. Yeah, I always, it's like, and obviously it's like a fantasy world where every student gets confronted with this idea and understands it and cares about it. But like that's why I was like, even when I like worked at help desk was like, yeah, this is a service that's available to you. Like, you know, you, you get access to Google Drive space like this. If I were you, I'd put important stuff. I'd make backups of it though, because what if you leave and you don't want to deal with that, but like that's not, you know, like ultimately having that like individual responsibility of your data would be ideal. But students aren't always confronted with that. It doesn't matter to them at that time, but maybe it does later. You know, there's a million issues with that. And that's where it's always good to see like schools doing right by students data when they can. But I think the harder thing is like painting that picture for what students should even expect of like, yeah, you have access to service and we do have written down on this webpage that maybe you clicked on, that this is how long it lasts or we sent you an email and stuff like that. But it is, it is really difficult in these like temporary, you're here for four or five, whatever years to get students to like encounter that even because there's just a lot to know. It's true. I mean, the other thing there too, on the point of the different tools, we've struggled with that with demand in one's own and all joking aside, that transition towards working with schools and luckily we herons on and we work with getting the spreadsheets and comparing and then removing and keeping people down beneath 500 or whatever that needs to be. But that's where hopefully Tom, if and when we have time with Middlebury or with UMW or with whoever else is working with us. Like I would like to see tools that, you know, do that. The only other thing that that starts to get into also like student systems and access to data that do you want us to have. And so like there's actually we don't necessarily want it for us because then we start to get into the weird. Like we know when that faculty left, we know when that students graduating or not or like we have data that we don't necessarily want should or want access to. And I think that's where that trick is, but there's no two ways that at least the process of getting a clear idea of when students are leaving and being able to kind of get at that should be cleaner and better and make that process easier. But like you're saying, that's just one tool, our tool. Like you're dealing with how many, like hypothesis is a good example. You know, you name the next one, whether it's press books or whatever, that would be extremely a lot of overhead for the people who are managing it. So it's almost like you're not managing at tech anymore. You're managing vendors who manage your at tech and how they manage that, right? It's crazy. Yeah. Well, we're at our 15 roughly. So folks had a drop of course do so. My daughter just brought me a cookie that they apparently were baking cookies. So I'm going to duck out pretty soon too. But this is as always a pretty good conversation that I'm happy to be witness to. So thank you all for coming. Great seeing you again, Chris, Jerry, J.R. Thanks for jumping in and Shannon, big fan.