 Hello Internet, welcome to another episode of Reclaim Today. My name is Tim Owens. I'm one of the co-founders of Reclaim Hosting, and I'm joined today by Dr. Pete Rohrbaugh from Kennesaw State University, isn't that right? And we are talking a little bit today about, Pete, you had contacted me and basically said, I want to get off of Google. And I was like, okay, well that's not a small thing whatsoever, so we should probably have a conversation about it and kind of talk about what that means, but I'll let you speak a little bit to this, but you were interested in thinking through what that might look like. And obviously, of course, that leads down the technology path of what software might you need to kind of support the services that you're used to, whether it be email, Google Drive, things of that nature and that kind of stuff. So I thought this is a perfect episode for Reclaim Today because you're not alone. You know, much like Facebook and Twitter and other social media and networks and technology companies, I think a lot of people are starting to take a much harder look at privacy, security, all those various things, whether, you know, like I said, I mean, even my wife is a huge TikTok fan and now she's suddenly thinking, I don't know, you know, if that's a good idea or not. So I'm interested to hear a little bit about, like, what kind of drove that decision? Like, I imagine this is not something that you just woke up one morning and just decided, you know what? I'm going to do it. It's been probably a culmination of a lot of events. So kind of talk to me a little bit about, like, where your head's at with this. Cool. Well, thanks for having me. I'll be glad to do that. I would say that the beginnings of this kind of interest of mine go all the way back to when I first started using social media. So I was a really reluctant social media person up until about 2010. And in that year, I had a postdoc at Georgia Tech and we were really being pushed to kind of explore digital environments differently. And I found a way that critical pedagogy and technology could kind of solve some double pronged problems for me. But at that point, so many of my friends were already on it, so that when I joined Twitter for the first time that year, the only way that I cultivated a network on Twitter or used Twitter was professionally. So I never, and I had avoided using Facebook up until then as well. So I never had a specifically like social, you know, like a boundaries social experience on social media. It always began from like a professional sense, and it certainly has become more social. But I was really picky about how I did that because some parts of share culture I just didn't really get or understand. And so I never joined Facebook. There was a moment in 2017 when there was a protest movement going on on my campus that I wanted to be able to communicate with people about and the only way they were organizing was on Facebook. So I bit the bullet and opened a page for that year to communicate with those folks and then shuttered it. And I picked up lots of social media platforms and played with them over the years. But, you know, like carefully, critically, however, Google from the beginning has just always been kind of a central part of my internet experience. I wrote my entire dissertation on Google Docs and, you know, I mean, have used it for probably hundreds or maybe even thousands of classroom activities and collaborative writing experiments and stuff like that even before I came to, you know, to kind of understand Domain of One's Own. Google was the thing that I really enjoyed the most and always felt comfortable with their decisions as a company, you know, up until the last couple of years. So I would say that in the last three years, really around the time of, and we're going to talk about him in a minute, but around the time of Snowden, Edward Snowden's closures and Cambridge Analytica, I really started kind of paying closer attention to even the resources on the web that I use, that I like, that I didn't feel itchy about. And that thought, that concern has just continued to kind of germinate. So that by the end of last year, I had decided that one of my big goals for 2020 was going to be to experiment with pulling myself off of Google in terms of email, in terms of cloud storage. And, you know, the one thing I can't figure out yet how to get around is a phone. Once Reclaim starts making open source phones, then I'll be curious about that. But yeah, so I, you know, I started looking at these things and I opened up an account with a company called Proton Mail that probably a lot of people have heard of and they're an encrypted and to end encrypted email service. I started using Signal because of some research, some research that I've been doing for the last two years has had me interacting with or doing interviews with people in the Atlanta Antifa movement. And all of those conversations are, you know, they're very concerned about privacy. So so I started using Signal about two years ago for that and just increasingly I've become kind of just like I try and slow down, you know, once a week and kind of pay attention to like where my stuff is living and who owns it and how much time I'm spending on particular platforms. But the real, you know, the thing that kind of really jolted me to contact you and to kind of accelerate this process was that I just finished a, I would say a reading, but it was a listening of the permanent record memoir that would Snowden published last fall. And it's basically like life. And I haven't read that book yet. And it's interesting to me because, I mean, obviously, I know who Edward Snowden is and I was aware of sort of the NSA stuff and that kind of thing. But that book is fairly recent. I think it came out in 2019. And so I'm interested to hear about like, you know, like, how does that play with Google? Because it's interesting hearing you talk, you know, we're almost a and maybe it's a generational thing. I don't know. I don't want to pretend that I'm super young, but we're kind of at different crossroads because I was almost like raised up into social media, which I imagine sort of younger generations are. I had Facebook back in college in 2006. I had a Gmail beta account back when people were trying to sell them on eBay. And so I've had, you know, Google accounts for a long time as well. And then, of course, you know, Twitter, I joined back when several of my friends were on there and that kind of stuff. And then there was the slow move into the professional. But it was it was sort of a thing of like, oh, you can use this stuff for professional purposes as well. But it was already embedded in sort of the the culture of my surroundings in terms of using that stuff. And obviously, because of, you know, likely, you know, I would say probably because of my age, you know, when you're joining something in college, you're not thinking critically about it, especially not in 2006, 2007. Right. So, you know, that's something as well, where it's just sort of like, oh, Facebook's awesome. I can connect to people. I had no idea, you know, sort of the the history behind why, you know, Mark Zuckerberg had created it and sort of the problematic aspects of it. You know, all we knew is where our parents were in on there. And so this is a great space where we can all kind of hang out and meet other people. So. Right. Yeah. So I don't know if you want to do you want me to set some background up on Snowden or just talk more specifically about like what reading that book has made me decide to do? I guess I guess a little bit of both. I mean, you know, like, tell me a little bit more about, you know, in particular, you know, how the relationship to the book is kind of driving because it's it's a memoir, right? It's sort of a history of his life and that kind of thing. But I imagine it goes into some detail about the kind of things that he uncovered while he was working for the NSA. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So, I mean, he he, you know, documents his life as a nerd, you know, from birth to his early 20s when he starts working for the government. And his experience is much like you described of your own, where he was basically raised into many of these systems and to date myself. My university, University of Georgia, didn't even start giving student students email addresses until the year after I graduated. So. Oh, wow. You know, I didn't get my first email account until I was working after I graduated. But yeah, I think the biggest thing that this book taught me. And, you know, Snowden I've just been kind of fascinated with. It's like as an advocacy kind of figure. And I know that he's kind of he's controversial, obviously, for lots of different reasons. Is that I, you know, my concerns about privacy as they started to develop several years ago had way more to do with what Google or Apple or, you know, specifically Facebook, because I never wanted to be inside of that system. What they could know about me and what they could do with that information and the way that it's monetized and and algorithms that are used to ship me ads. You know, those were my main concerns really up until about a year or two ago. But when you read this book, you know, we all kind of should have known if we were paying really close attention to that news that broke when when he disclosed all of his stuff, which I think was in 2013 or 2014. I'll need to go back and check that. But, you know, the big thing that he uncovered was the fact that that without any kind of democratic order or policy, components of the NSA and the CIA just began massive bulk collection of cell phone records and digital footprint records and metadata around calls and emails and stuff like that, scraping all of that stuff with the consent of those companies and they were able to the way that they were able at first to get around having to have a warrant for that stuff is they they made an argument that if they collected it, they weren't obtaining it. So obtaining they would only count something as obtaining if once they had built this massive database, then they went in and searched you for your stuff. They originally said, well, that's what we would have to get a warrant for. We don't need to get a warrant to collect it. We just need to get a warrant to be able to look at it or search it. And even that even that boundary or restriction eventually eroded so that by the time that Snowden, you know, packs up all copies, a whole bunch of documents and gets ready to leave and disclose all of it to journalists, he can go in or, you know, intelligence workers can go into this this program called X key score and basically look up any American citizen and be able to have access to almost anything that that person is doing on a device with the consent of the, you know, the internet service providers and the third party companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, they just they just are scraping all of that metadata. And so the point is that actually, you know, people are concerned about the content of things like the content of their email or the content of their text messages, but that actually he makes the argument that the metadata is actually more dangerous in both collection because the metadata can can reveal all kinds of things like where you are, how often you are at that place and how often you're communicating with with specific individuals. He mentions the fact that, like, if they're if they're really going after somebody, they can turn cameras on and off. And these are all like we joked about for years. You know, everybody, you know, talks, you know, like talks about those ideas in a kind of tin foil hat kind of way. But it's actually, you know, reading that book actually made me kind of rerouted me back in the in the position of that the government, at least the intelligence community, has has really won a major victory in this sense, if they have convinced us to turn that into a joke, you know, like if we joke about that and we know that it's possible, then we become, you know, like so much more willing, complicit agents in this equation than than we would have been if suddenly it was revealed that this was happening to us. Well, and you've got to assume, you know, that that's in partnership with these technology companies where I mean that the NSA and CIA and all these other folks must be thrilled at the idea that people are actually, you know, lining up to buy, you know, ring devices that'll put cameras on their front door and then, hey, maybe even put a drone in your house to kind of surveil your house in the name of security. And it's it's wild to think like, yeah, that would have been an absolute joke, the idea that people would put drones in their house or, you know, like if somebody had said, oh, yeah, I know that the government's going to put drones inside of our house, we would say, that's crazy. It's like, yeah, because they're not, you're going to go out and buy them and happily, you know, log in, log in with your social media accounts to register the device and then connect it all to your to your data and that kind of thing. So it's just crazy how how times have changed in that regard. Yeah. And to see the extent, you know, the extent to which the government went after him for that and has obviously pursued other people who want to reveal stuff like that, you know, his claim is just so it's so simple that, you know, we just we just conceded. We've just given over all of this privacy. Right. And I wonder if some of that I wonder if some of that erosion comes, you know, in light of 9 11 and the Patriot Act and sort of this sense of like, you know, you know, safety and security by virtue of surveillance. Right. It was almost that mentality of like, well, normally I wouldn't, but, you know, we're in a different time and things have changed here with the whole game, you know, the whole field has been leveled and now we need to suddenly think differently about a lot of these things. And and so in the name of, you know, security and privacy for our country, we need to allow this and if you're not, then, of course, you're not patriotic and maybe even you treasonous, right? Yeah. And that's certainly the context that he puts all this stuff in, you know, like I didn't know I didn't know that he never graduated from high school or college, he was a self taught, you know, coder and the way that he describes his entry into intelligence work is just that in the aftermath of 9 11, nobody in the intelligence community knew how to work computers the way that self taught people like him did. And so his skills allowed him to kind of rise in a meteoric way through that organization, because, you know, he he he was tasked with building, you know, he didn't know it at the time, according to the book, but he was tasked with building all of these systems that collected all of this information. It wasn't until really his last two years or three years in intelligence that he realized that all of these little projects he'd been working on were part of this larger, you know, kind of data dragnet. Mm hmm. So it's interesting because you said, you know, you you've already made some motions to get off of Google services. Surprisingly, you mentioned proton mail, which was one of my going to be one of my recommendations, because I think mail is maybe one of the harder aspects that, you know, a lot of people sign up for reclaim hosting accounts and they think, well, I definitely want my own email address based on my domain. And I'm like, you can. Here's the thing, you know, like you get a cheap $30 a year account, there's a good chance when you try to send email, it goes into spam or you try to receive email and the spam filters aren't as good as what's with Gmail and those kind of things. And there are whole companies that not only think only about email 24 seven, that's all they do, but do it in a really secure and and conscious way, which I think proton mail is a great example of that. And so, you know, you mentioned signal and a few others where it's so it sounds like you've already, as you said, been thinking about this and started to slowly extract some things. What are what are the aspects keeping you there? I mean, do you still have a Gmail account? Do you still have, you know, you mentioned Google Drive? I think it's probably a big one that a lot of people grapple with, not just in terms of storing files, but collaborative work with those. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So so I mean, I certainly still have a Gmail account. You know, that's going to be a big day when I when I decide to switch, turn the spigot off in one place and turn it on in the other. And I'll probably leave the Gmail account open for a little while, you know, as I do that, but really the biggest, the biggest hurdle and the thing that sent me to you is is storage. And the fact that, you know, over a decade's worth of digital pictures that have just been automatically backed up to Google Photos for me in a very easy, seamless, searchable, albumizable way for years. And and I don't and I want to de-camp from that eventually. And also I want to have, you know, tools for, you know, document storage and collaborative writing experiences. So, you know, I've looked a little bit, you know, I knew from the beginning, actually, as Google Docs was rolling out that it was, as I understand, it's a mod, a kind of Google branding of another, a different open source project called Etherpad. And every once in a while, I check in on Etherpad to see if it's still a thing. And I think, I mean, the last time I checked it was, but I also know that there's plenty of open source writing tools that, you know, could be used for that kind of thing. So, you know, that kind of shareable, collaborative word processor function is something that I'm still looking for. So if you have a suggestion, that'd be great. But ultimately, the big thing that I want to do, if reclaimed, you know, if you guys have the resources for it is, I want to take all of that storage that I have of documents and spreadsheets and pictures in Google. And I want to put it on a server, you know, that I'm paying for. And that I know very well, you know, cannot be manipulated the way that all of that stuff that's sitting on Google servers currently can. And so that's that's my biggest kind of question to you and to reclaim is, do those services exist for me to move that stuff? And what does it cost and then what applications do I need to start learning to figure out how to access that stuff? About a year ago, I started playing around an own, I think it's called own cloud. And I installed an instance of own cloud on my domain with you guys. And I didn't spend a whole bunch of time playing with it. I left it alone. But yeah, I'm curious whether you guys, whether y'all have helped other people do this, whether there are people that, you know, have have left big cloud data storage stuff and moved to storing it with y'all, which obviously is still cloud, right, but it's owned by more, it's more owned by me because I'm paying for it. Is that right? Right. Yeah. I mean, you're always going to have different shades of gray. One of my biggest concerns, you know, from the get go when we started reclaim hosting was like, well, what if the what if the CIA or the FBI shows up at our doorstep and we have to turn over information? How does that make us any different from Google? And, you know, in some ways it doesn't. If you're a U.S. based company, you know, that's that's where maybe proton males got it going on because, you know, they're out in Switzerland or wherever they are and they don't necessarily have to abide by the same rules and laws and regulations as in the U.S. One of the things that we did just as a FYI down in the legal section of our website, if you go there and, of course, there's terms of service and all that kind of stuff, but we put what they call a canary clause in there, which basically because what happens is if the if a government agency requires you to turn over information about someone, they can also require you to not say that you did, which is really problematic. You know, you can't even admit we had to do this because of X, Y and Z. They can basically say you're not allowed to talk about this at all. However, a canary clause is basically in your terms and basically says, you know, as long as this clause exists in our terms, we have never been asked to turn over anything. And so removing that canary clause, you know, it is a good indicator of, hey, they were probably asked to do something like that. So, you know, and, you know, knock on lots of pieces of wood right now up today, you know, where it's seven years old now. We have not been asked to do anything of that nature. But I think you're right. Like the DIY and the kind of do it on your own, it's still going to require whether it's a Raspberry Hub in your living room or Raspberry Pi in your living room or if it's on Reclaim Hosting. I think there's varying degrees of open. There's varying degrees of how you can get off of these other services and things like that. OwnCloud, I think is a great example. And there's another project called NextCloud. And so this is kind of an interesting history. So OwnCloud, you're right. That's been on Reclaim Hosting. And it's sort of seen as a Dropbox replacement, right? It's got apps for Windows, for Mac, you install it, you get folders on your computer that you can drop your files into and it uploads it to the cloud or to your hosting account or wherever the case may be. Wherever you've got OwnCloud installed. So very easy to set up, very easy to just drop files in there and it works. OwnCloud had a bit of a fork with the developers that were involved with it a couple of years back, I guess a disagreement on how things were moving forward or how they were marketing things. And so a project was forked out of it called NextCloud. And NextCloud has become very popular. I've actually got it up on my laptop here so you can kind of get a sense of this. And this is also available in Reclaim Hosting, shared hosting, but we'll also talk about some other platforms that might make sense if we're talking large amounts of data. But what I find really interesting about NextCloud is that there are applications that are installed in addition to that whole file syncing thing. So they're really trying to market it as a solution, not just in terms of NextCloud files, which is that file syncing, sharing files with other people, desktop, mobile, web apps, all that kind of thing. But also there's the talk section for calls, chat, web meetings. There's the group where, which is calendar, contacts and mail. And most notably, they don't do any mail server functionality, but you can integrate through IMAP with other mail services. So you could take your proton mail information, but plug it into here and be checking your mail within the same section where you're managing your documents and that kind of stuff. You know, they've got collaborative things using something called Lord. Let me go here and take a look. I believe it's called Collabora. Yeah, they talk about collaborating with documents. So this is something that we could certainly play around with as well. I think there's a lot of interesting things here. But it's essentially that hub. It's that central workspace that allows you then to not just, you know, uploading the files is easy because again, you've got a desktop application. You got folders and you can, you know, take everything and just kind of move it in there. And that might be a good first step. Like you said, it's just getting everything onto a space that you own and control. But then using the plugins or the applications, they call them in there to say, OK, all my stuff's in here. Now what can I do with it? Well, I add the collaborative document editing thing on top of it. And now all of my Word documents become something that I can invite others to work with me on. I add the, you know, the image gallery functionality. And all of a sudden, all of my photos that are in here, I can suddenly do something with. I can take those folders and turn it in maybe to a public gallery for certain folders where I can kind of organize the metadata around them. And so it's sort of building on top of just basic file synchronization with something where I think it offers a ton of functionality. And because they're not having to build all of it, they allow third party developers, the application is open source and people can build integrations on top of it, then you can decide, OK, what do I need to do? Is there an integration that currently exists for this? And you don't necessarily have to go outside of that box and say, well, I'll go and use this service. You know, you can actually use it within your account. What's really interesting about NextCloud, too, is I think they even have an application for the Raspberry Pi. So you could technically run NextCloud on a device, on a basically a miniature server that's on that's in your house. Now, there's reasons you may not want to do that necessarily. You know, internet connections go down, power goes out, that kind of stuff. There are certainly benefits to storing everything, you know, in a space that's, you know, more centrally managed and hosted in that kind of thing. One of the one of the concerns always, you know, with the shared, there's a couple concerns with shared hosting, which I believe has sort of been your experience with us up and up until recently. Shared hosting in domain of one's own were sort of the two features that we had, you know, and shared hosting was sort of for everybody in domain of one's own was more of an institutional version of shared hosting. Storage is always really difficult because you talk about large file sizes, not individually, but, you know, in bulk, you know, if you're talking, you know, hundreds of gigabytes of data, it's just not something, you know, because, you know, you're sharing server space with several other people on the system and then there's finite limits to the amount of storage. And so that's always a concern. The other thing is just sort of like our shared hosting space is really meant for web hosting. Web hosting can mean a lot to different people. But again, like I said, we always shy away from email. We kind of shy away from just, hey, throw hundreds of gigabytes of stuff on there and not do anything with it. It's really meant for get a domain, get a website up and running that kind of thing. We recently launched a product this summer called Reclaim Cloud, which we've talked a little bit in previous episodes about and things like that. I think people are still coming around to understanding what it is. And that that will be, I think, a journey and a conversation for probably years to come in terms of what does the cloud actually mean? But one really cool thing about it is it removes a lot of those limitations. So instead of buying a cheap shared hosting account and getting a slice of a server with a finite amount of stuff, you're basically paying for the raw resource usage. So so in terms of next cloud, you've got it up and running and you're paying 10 cents a gigabyte, you know, and then from there per month, right? And so then you can you're only paying for exactly what you're using. And you can stop and start systems and that kind of stuff. And so I in terms of flexibility, that's probably the way to go, especially when we talk about large amounts of storage. There may be other workarounds, too. We've had some folks who've used a shared hosting account to run the application, but then they'll use cloud storage to actually store the files. And that might take the form of like Amazon S3, but again, that's Amazon storage and that kind of thing, which has its own question marks and all that kind of stuff, but much cheaper again as well as S3 storage. I think it's three cents a gigabyte. It's almost ridiculous. But you know, and so I've had some folks who come with needing to run an Omega install, but they're going to have terabytes of data. And so like S3 is a great thing for that. I think if you're somewhere in the middle and you don't need terabytes upon terabytes because, you know, while there are no limitations necessarily, we're also not Amazon, so I don't have a whole data center in my backyard with, you know, petabytes of hard disk space and that kind of stuff. So we'd have to work with you on how much data it is. But if it certainly goes over the shared hosting limits and we're talking 200, 300 gigs of stuff or whatever the case may be, I think the cloud is a great option for that because you're only paying for what you use scales up. And it's still 10 cents a gig, which can end up being, you know, fairly cheap. I mean, if you had 300 gigs of stuff, that would be 30 bucks a month. So, you know, it's not terribly expensive for what it is. And projects like Next Cloud would be absolutely support in there. We could help you get it up and running. I think it offers something really interesting there because you might be able to sidestep just storing all your files somewhere and actually start off on the right foot by storing it somewhere where you can actually start to integrate on top of it. You've got a platform to be able to do that as opposed to saying, OK, well, I got all my stuff on a folder now and I see it in a file manager. But now what? Now I need something else. You know, right? So I've got two questions. Well, I'm probably 5,000 questions coming off of it. I'm unlimited to do the first one is because I haven't looked at the documentation that you guys have put up recently about about Reclaim Cloud and, you know, that in some ways, that was why I reached out. So when somebody has that service through you, you're not farming that out to an Amazon server, right? You are. No, it belongs to you. You guys can put your hand physically on the computer where that stuff is, right? We lease the actual server so we don't have a data. We're located in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and we don't have a data center near here. And so we we lease the servers from a company called OVH and we have servers in the US and Canada and in the UK, but they are our dedicated servers. And so these companies basically will set up a dedicated server for you, give you remote access to and have all the controls and then you get a terminal and you you build out whatever you want to build out. So it is our hardware. It just exists with the data center that's not owned by us because that's a whole another level is to run your own data center. So yeah, but if I wanted to, yeah, I could probably drive up to the to Vent Hill in Virginia and put my hand on the actual server. Right. OK. Now, when people this is a side note, but when people do use Amazon cloud hosting, I mean, that that kind of resource is not as I understand it. It's not as perforated as something like what Google, like in other words, Google is able to mine all of my emails and advertise to me because of that. But when people even people are using Amazon cloud hosting, Amazon has promised not to dip into that data for their own purposes. Is that that's what I have understood to be true. But is that true? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not sure that I have the definitive answer on it either. That would be my assumption. But I'd hate to assume either way. I know Amazon definitely has. There's like big, I was going to say, there's like big companies that like massive amounts of their own. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Amazon. So I can't imagine they would they would be OK with that. Right. And then, you know, the other thing that you can think about doing it, and I would say, you know, save this for after you start getting stuff on there. But one thing to think about, too, is encryption. And so, you know, when you add encryption as another layer on top of it, you're not just putting your file somewhere, but you're encrypting it with a key, which only you have access to. But that means that even if I have access to the server and I were to open up and take the hard drive out, plug it in and look at the files on the server. I can't actually read any data of it because I don't have the credentials to be able to unlock that. So that's another layer on top. Typically, when we think of like websites and email encrypted stuff starts to there's always a performance side problem with that because it takes longer to access and read data and write data every because it's doing a lot more. It's not just putting it on a server, but it's encrypting all of it. But that might be something to look into as well. You know, that's why, you know, Apple gets a really good rep with this, you know, in terms of privacy, because like with their text messaging and with other things, everything is sort of end encrypted. You mentioned signal. That's another example of end to end, you know, encryption in that if they wanted to, they couldn't read your messages. And that's one of the best cases for a company even like ours to be in is if people encrypt their data, I literally like, sure, I can turn it over. But when they say, well, we can't make any heads or tails of this, I say, neither can I because I don't have the keys to it. So that might be something to look into as well. My assumption is that you're right. I think Amazon is it's at least at a different level, right? Like because you're really using cloud storage in a way where you're writing objects to a system where they're not necessarily looking at it in the same way as like Google's poll business is that data mining. Not only, you know, do they have no problem doing it, but it's actually listed out as a feature, you know, we're going to crawl all of your emails, we're going to show you ads based on the kind of stuff that you're reading about, you know, like we're going to check all of your photos and tell you what they are and also suggest like minded photos and things like that. They market it as a feature, but that's exactly what they're doing. Amazon is not necessarily in that same business. They much like reclaimed cloud, I would say they want you to use them for the resources they want you to pay for the storage and pay for the actual resources that you're using. And obviously for companies like Netflix and others that are doing it at scale, that that equals quite a bit of money. So of course, Amazon's using it for their own infrastructure as well, which doesn't hurt. Right, exactly. So my second question has to do with I actually don't even know what to what bucket to put this question in, but but I'll set up this kind of context. So when we all started using, you know, people watching this may use Google Docs or not, but when we all started using Google Docs, we did not imagine that it was going to be the kind of foundational platform for writing and collaboratively sharing that it became. So we didn't we didn't have to think very much at that point. Like, what if I have to leave this place because, you know, like the frog in the water, like it just crept up on us. We blinked our eyes and for you, you know, tons of our stuff is there. But yeah, once I'm thinking about, you know, OK, this is the first place that I actually have kind of really created or generated a lot of data and I'm now getting ready to move it. You know, my questions are, am I going to be able to move it out of Google in a format that I can actually even access and use in that next cloud format or that, you know, on that server? And then almost more importantly, moving forward, you know, next cloud probably is not going to be around as long as Google. Like Google, the one thing about Google that we can trust for a while is that it's going to be there, right? So we don't have to think about formats that much because we're we're pretty, you know, we can we can believe with a lot of probability that that format is going to exist. If I move to next cloud, I can kind of assume at some point or points in my life, I'm going to have to, you know, move from like not move the data, but but scale from next cloud to some other platform because next cloud is maybe nobody's working on next cloud anymore or something like that. So do I have to think about the format, whether it's like PDF or even like a lower level kind of like text based or kind of like a I don't know how the right language to put it in because I'm I'm way less I'm way less computer science, science than you guys are. But do I have to think about what kind of format the program is in before I start dumping it into this other place so that it can even be red or used? Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think, you know, especially when we think of like PDFs can be really problematic because they're really not around editing. They're really around a presentation layer in which I can give you a PDF and it's going to look exactly right. Even if you don't have those fonts installed, even if you don't have the images in a separate folder, I can just hand you one file and it shows everything. But again, like, you know, Adobe runs the PDF document. It's not really a good format for editing. I know Google Drive supports a couple different formats. Of course, Microsoft Word has been, you know, sort of, you know, top of the list. You know, ever since the 90s, that's sort of been like the word processing standard is sort of if your application doesn't support handling word documents, then who are you? Right. So like there's that side of things. There is also something called the open document format. And I think this was pushed a very, very strong early on by a software suite called OpenOffice. And so that's sort of like the open answer to Microsoft Word was the open document format. It ends in .odt. I think there's similar ones for whether it be a spreadsheet or a presentation slides. One interesting thing is that you can export to different formats and kind of play around with them. So I would encourage you to like as part of this to see like what does work best? My guess is that in terms of flexibility, Microsoft Word format, as long as we're talking documents in terms of that, Microsoft Word for for presentations, PowerPoint for spreadsheets, Excel, while it is sort of Microsoft and that's its whole another thing, the flip side of that is in terms of interoperability, that's where it's at, right? Every software tool that wants you to be able to work with documents is going to need to be able to support .docx, right? Every presentation software wouldn't be worth their salt if you couldn't import PowerPoint slides. So you kind of have to follow that in terms of having the same interoperability between different software. And again, I think that's where the archive options are really interesting too. So I know with Google, you can kind of say, I want to back up of all of my stuff. And it would be interesting to see what does that format look like? If you just tell Google, I want the archive of everything in Google Drive. What do they give you? Do they give you .google files, right? And what can you convert those and those kind of things? I think it's it's really important, you know, depending on on your use case, right? So like if it's just I need to get the raw contents and move it over, Word doc is probably fine. It probably gets a lot trickier if it's like I can't live without all of the comments on this document, so I need to make sure that I'm pulling it out in a format where all of the comments are all of the version history. Does that even come out in an export? So thinking through those kind of things as well, you might say, well, you know, like for this, I don't care necessarily as long as I have the raw contents. And for this, though, I need all of the comments on the side. I need the version history and all of those. But my guess is that either Microsoft Word or the open document format are going to be the two most compatible in terms of if there is a feature in there that's not Google specific, that it would probably come over in that format. Things like Microsoft Word support track changes. They support commenting. And typically I found when I export a document in that format, it brings over all of those things that that were in the Google document itself, which is nice. OK, yeah, that's good. I mean, and you said, I think it's going to require me to do some experimenting and like how, you know, I don't want to pull all that stuff out all at once without being aware of like what what it's going to look like when it comes across. Yeah. And I think of it too, like, you know, and that's why I think it would be interesting to find out, like, what would like a full export from Google look like in terms of you say, you know, they've got that, what did they call a Google takeout, I think, where where it's sort of like, I want my backup of everything. And I imagine in some cases, and I found this to be the case like with Twitter archives, where they give you the backup and it's HTML files and there's some JSON files and some all kinds of other stuff. And you might look at it and go, I have no idea how to use this necessarily. But maybe if you have the Word document and that's good, but then you've got all the other metadata in XML files or something else as a historical thing, it might be good to just have that. And you don't necessarily have to have that living on next cloud up on whatever you store that on a local hard drive somewhere. You keep it in a safe box or wherever you wherever you need to just have that stuff and know that it's there. And sometimes like when I've exported websites, this is a perfect example, like with a WordPress site, I'm closing it down. I want to convert it to static HTML because I don't want to manage the WordPress site anymore. So I'll convert the whole thing to HTML, but I'll still take a full backup of the database and I'll still make a copy of all the files and I'll store those together and I know if I ever needed to recreate it, I could and I still have all of the metadata around it, the theme information, everything that I need to be able to rebuild it if I need to in order to access contents that I can't from that HTML version. But it's more of just the safekeeping of knowing, OK, this is the true backup, but I'm converting it now to something that's more sustainable for what I need right now. So kind of keeping a copy of both, I think makes a lot of sense too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, all of that is helpful. And you know, and it sounds like the the the reclaimed cloud idea that you guys have, did you say you guys just kind of roll that out this year? We did. We were in beta over the summertime and then we launched it officially at the end of July, so it's a fairly new thing for us. And you know, in part for cloud is big because it kind of supports technologies that were never supported in C-Panel, which was really huge for us, the ability to do Docker containers and run applications that you couldn't run before. I mean, we've even run like an open source jitzy meat instance to be able to do web conferencing within our community and do stuff like that. Our community forums, which run discourse are on there. So we've been kind of eating our own dog food and doing a lot of our internal projects in there as well, just because the platform kind of supports all of that. So it's been it's been really great. And I think, you know, it offers a lot more flexibility. It doesn't mean that you couldn't start on your shared hosting account, but if you're planning to move a lot of data over it, rather than starting one place and then having to do a full migration, it might make sense to just start off on the right foot and get it going over there. And I can certainly help you with that. Cool. I guess one last question, which maybe is a much longer conversation for later, but we can at least like follow the top arc of it is. I did start experimenting a couple of years ago with that application that you all had some hand in or worked with then word, wordmuller, wordmuller on called known. I know that has kind of either changed or or kind of. I don't know actually where known is right now, but I know that people are like picking it up and playing with it. Then I saw a couple of years ago. So is there maybe it's that one, but maybe are there other open source applications that somebody can use on their own domain that kind of recreate or that model social media, but that where you own all of the stuff where the, you know, you're not going through Twitter, you're not going through Instagram, but you're kind of creating your own social media stream. Yeah, there's two with maybe a side car of one other that I'll mention. Known, I think is a great one. So known is still around. It's still it's primarily now an open source project. So I think that was the big shift was for a while there was a commercial entity. And yeah, Ben wordmuller was running it and sort of running it as a business, but it was always open source as well. Now it's just the open source component making up that infrastructure. And of course, then that has the side effect of you're relying now on open source. And so is there a community to keep it updated in that kind of thing? It is still, you know, solid software. I know a lot of people in the indie web community are still using it as a way to publish on your own site and then syndicate or push it out to Twitter, to Facebook, to all those various spaces. So that's definitely still around in a good option. Another one that I hear a lot about. And now this is one that is not able to be installed on your own domain. You can map a domain to it, but it's a very solid company. It's called MicroBlog. And MicroBlog, I've been seeing more and more from a lot of different folks. In fact, the community manager for MicroBlog was just in one of our domain of one's own meetups recently that Chris Aldrich has been putting on as part of the indie web community. And so they support a lot of the similar underlying indie web principles in terms of federation, in terms of syndication and that kind of stuff. And I've seen people like Dan Cohen on Twitter are publishing on MicroBlog and then pushing it out to Twitter. And so while the name is deceiving, it's not really just a blog. People are using it for short status updates as well and then pushing those to Twitter, people are using those as sort of a replacement in some ways for the social media and they definitely do seem like the kind of company. And I think they've got a blog post where they kind of explain why they didn't go down the route of trying to build it as software that could be self-hosted. There's obviously always going to be a balance for a developer about how sustainable that is versus your core focus. And so MicroBlog is another one. And then the other one that I'll just mention briefly, but I've only played with very briefly and it seems to me at least much more just as a Twitter focused replacement as Mastodon. Again, Mastodon is supporting federated protocols. You can run it yourself. You can communicate with other instances that other people are running. And then, of course, they're shared instances like the main Mastodon website that you can just sign up and get an account. All of your data is portable in that sense. And that seems very similar types of communities that those sort of indie web principles. So those are the three off the top of my head that I can think of in terms of ease of use and install, I think known as probably still at the top of that list. But I would encourage you to maybe check out MicroBlog and Mastodon as two potential other scenarios of different ways. And I think it just depends, like, you know, what social media are you trying to either recreate or syndicate to and where's the support for those kind of things? It seems Mastodon is very easy to kind of dual post there and Twitter. But if I wanted to use it as a Facebook replacement, probably not. Like there's probably not a whole lot of integration there with that. It's really meant about short status updates. MicroBlog, to me, seems a lot more similar to known in that it's your own space. You're posting photos, you're posting status updates, you're posting everything, you know, and then pushing those out to the various places where your other communities are, whether that be Twitter or Facebook, but keeping it central to that to that area as well. So, yeah, well, this has been super useful stuff, Tim. I really appreciate it. And, you know, obviously the stuff that these moves for me are not going to happen overnight, but I do still kind of have an interest in completing some bulk of this work by the end of the year. So, you know, I'll definitely be in communication with you guys about Reclaim Cloud and with that Next Cloud software. I really... Yeah, I'd love to have a follow up on this and kind of see where you are with it and things are going and you've actually inspired me. I'm going to need to sign up for like a proton mail account and a signal account because you're already well ahead of me on those things. And so I think it's a good reminder, I think, for everybody that experimentation is good and really just like continually refining and playing around with the things and it doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. You don't have to quit everything today and try and rebuild it. And that can often end in frustration where you go like, well, I've got to use Google because I tried yesterday to push everything to one thing and it just didn't work. I think it could be iterative steps. It can be a slow progression over time where you take up little pieces of it like, OK, right, I'm going to keep my Gmail, but I'm also going to have this account over here and I map my domain to it. To me, like that's also the power of mapping domains, right? Is that like that's like your central authority. That's your truth, right, is your domain. And then you switch what email client you use underneath of it. Nobody knows, right? You switch whatever hosting company or whether website software. People are just going to a URL. So like that's to me, why it's always been so important for people to get their own domain and as much as services can allow that mapping domains on top of it does give you that flexibility to kind of tinker around in the background and say, I'm going to try this for a little bit. Now I'm going to try that, see what works, what doesn't and have a slow progression towards, you know, something that you have more control over. Yeah, I appreciate the conversation. Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, I mean, when I was when I was finishing up that book, the the one thing that struck me was how embedded this is my last comment. I'm sorry, how you're fine. Embedded was in a bunch of like, you know, really top secrets, scary systems, how difficult it was for him to extract himself from those with the goal of coming forward with all of this stuff. And I just thought, you know, like that's the position you don't want to be in. You know, you don't want to be involved. You know, everybody, you know, like people that I think don't don't haven't looked into these privacy issues are often like the first thing out of their mouth is, well, why would you want to do that if you don't have anything to hide? The issue is you want to figure these things out before or if you ever do have something that you want to keep to yourself. It's easier to solve it when you're not, you know, like under some kind of political or legal pressure to figure that stuff out, figure it out when you don't have any pressure and you just kind of want to learn. You know, I don't I mean, I'm not I don't I don't I don't want Google going through all my stuff, but I'm also not hiding government secrets. But if I end up if I end up in that situation, I want to have to figure this stuff out first. So yeah, starting starting with starting with the assumption that, you know, I all of my stuff is mine, it's private. And then to the extent that I want other people to have access to it, I think it's like you said, it's it's very hard to to, you know, roll that back, you know, after you've already done it and it takes time and it takes work. So yeah, well, I again, dude, I appreciate the conversation. I look forward to talking with you more about how things are going, how we can support you with it, because, you know, you're certainly not alone in thinking these things. I think a lot of people are thinking really hard about like surveillance culture, privacy, security, all that kind of stuff. And it's also hard like this stuff's not easy, right? So, you know, it's gotten easier. There are a lot more options, though, out there. And sometimes that, I think, too, can be paralyzing. So I appreciate the conversation. Look forward to more. Yeah, thank you for your time. I appreciate it, Tim. Awesome. All right. Take care.