 and that intro could not be any more relevant. It talks about expanding infrastructure, the vertical and the horizontal. And I'd say we have it, right? We're doing radio, multiple radios. Multiple radios, a TV, we've got it all. It's funny too, because when we first started talking in 2011 about the vertical and the horizontal, so much of that was premised in the idea of moving from radio to TV, right? Like the idea of having airwaves, you know? And then it's interesting how well that concept maps on top of our discussion today about reclaimed cloud, right? Like just the idea of vertical and horizontal scaling, right, and the idea. So let's start at the beginning, right? I was gonna say, what is reclaimed cloud? It's funny to, yeah, so let me go back and let me set the stage just for a second. It won't be long, and then take it from there, because this is, you know, this is your discovery. Oh, please. We were in, where were we in? We were in some freaking living room as virtual emojis. In the last episode? Yes. Oh, when we were in VR, yeah. Because you had to think, like, we, that was like just before you discovered this and all the work we've been doing with DS16TV and the radio and various things kind of stopped pretty suddenly. Cause you were like, dude, I think I found something. I think I discovered the next kind of, what I think of is like the Kubrickian obelisk, the black obelisk that marks a point in time when everything changes, like reclaimed cloud is our Kubrickian obelisk. Well, I was telling you, like, I feel like this pandemic has like whole eras. I feel like I've lived 10 years in the midst of the last three months. And like that, the initial era was me like baking lots of bread, like lots of, lots of carbs in that first month of the pandemic. And then, you know, we were doing a lot of streaming and experimental stuff, playing with the VR as we normally do. It was sort of a lull for us. Not that business was any different or crazy or whatever, but I think like with all the ed tech folks really super busy at their institutions just trying to make ends meet. I think we were just sort of like, okay, well, we're just gonna continue doing what we're gonna do. And so we were doing a lot of experimentation and stuff like that. And that was like its own era. And now like this feels weird to like, oh, we're back on DS1 to 6 TV. I remember DS1 to 6 TV. It just, it seems so long ago and it wasn't, you know? It's like the last streams I've done where like a month ago, but it's like, what a month, you know? Like, you know, it feels, it's wild just how time has been, you know, changed by all this. It has changed dramatically. I mean, the idea like you said, there's eras. Like we're all making bread, we're all streaming, we're all realizing it's not going away. Like we're all like going through our own existential crisis. And I think we're kind of, we've been lucky in that we've been in the last month really been able to focus on a project that hopefully will meet needs that we've heard about for years and that like as a company and as a group we can finally start truly addressing, right? And we're at the beginnings of that, which is super exciting. So do you wanna kind of like introduce the Reclaim Cloud? Sure, I mean, so that type of experimentation I've done for a long time and I wrote a blog post kind of talking a little bit about the history of this because it does go really far back. We have, obviously as a web hosting company and as, you know, experimental type ed tech folks, we've constantly wanted to push the boundaries of what we could do on particular servers, run software. I mean, the fact we're streaming to a TV station running an open source streaming software we're meeting in a meeting instance, you know, of Jitsi Me, which is open source video conferencing software. I love playing with this stuff. But of course when we started Reclaim Host and we kind of doubled down on Cpanel and Cpanel is great at WordPress, so Mecca, lots of PHP applications but it doesn't work well with a lot of the newer stuff. Time and time again and we've heard this from other people, we've felt it ourselves where you'd see a really cool software project and then it would be like, well, you just, you start up your Ubuntu server and then you run these three commands and you're up and running and you're like, oh, you have to have a whole server just to run this particular piece of software. And we've had a lot of luck with DigitalOcean doing things like that. It's not cheap by any means, you know, and there's a lot of overhead there. You have to know how to use terminal, you have to know, you know, you have to be like, okay, well, am I getting a $40 server, $80 server a month? You're kind of figuring out all those things but it has become a lot easier in the past, you know, I would say five, six years to spin up a virtual server and get up and running but that's still a pretty high barrier for folks who look at something like, God, I don't even know, like open edX and they say, can I install that on Reclaim Hosting? And you're like, yeah, no. Like, you know, there's a lot there. It takes a lot. And I don't know if you remember, do you remember where I was experimenting with running it as an Amazon image on AWS and doing that? That was my first post about it. I was like, this changes the nature of edTec when you can do that. And it costs the pennies on the dollar to give a faculty group a trial run of edX for four or five days, whatever it was. It was amazing. And we experimented even early on there, like in 2014, about a year after we started Reclaim Hosting, we played around with some virtualization. At the time we were using a piece of software called SolusVM and that allowed us to sell VPSs. We were in, you know, this was before we moved any of our own infrastructure to DigitalOcean. We bought, you know, a fairly large-sized server and we're like, oh yeah, people will buy a VPS from us and then they can run this software. No one did, like, because there were better providers out there, you know, there was Leno, there was DigitalOcean, there were others that they could do it from. And it was also still, like I said, a very high bar, like just giving someone a server doesn't really help them at all. And then we, at the same time, I was playing with Docker and Docker containers and that was similar to virtualization, but people were actually scripting out whole software packages very similar to actual images rather than here's your server, get the terminal, get up and running and that kind of thing. And so I was playing around with that to run, like, Ghost and some other stuff and I was like, oh man, it'd be cool if we could have some situation where people could run Docker. And so that's always been, like, at the forefront of my mind. It's like, if we could figure out a way to allow people to run containers, run Docker containers to run any app that they wanted to in a unified environment, that would be amazing. And so we've looked at Sandstorm. Sandstorm was one that we first saw and they weren't using Docker, but they were using Linux containers. So they were using the underlying technology for it. And- What did they call their technology, like Grains? Like Grains? Grains? Like Grains of Sand. There was a whole, like, yeah, there was a whole vocabulary that they used, like Grains and Seeds and really odd stuff like that and I don't know, but yeah, there were weird things about permissions. It was built on top of Meteor.js and it was difficult to build packages for it. I was never successful in doing that. I found it really hard to do. And it seemed like they were going for a model that did not work well for publishing. It didn't work well for building a website that needed to be online to the public. There was a lot of stuff you had to do because what it was trying to do was convert everything to flat files in some way. I don't know if you remember this, but it was like, if you were running WordPress while you had the grain open or the app open, it would run like a regular app, but as soon as you left it, it would shut itself down. So apps that needed to stay online for whatever reason, it needed to convert to flat files and present them as HTML. And that's really difficult to think about, like, for a variety of different reasons and every app had to be custom built to work just with that particular type of model. So it didn't work. It was just for us, it was like, okay, that's great if I can spin up an Etherpad instance and work with you really quickly. But if I wanna publish it all, if I wanna run a lot of software, it needs to continue to be able to stay online and be able to work the way it was intended to work, not have to rebuild an app to work specifically for Sandstorm. And so we kind of, and I should say, besides that, Sandstorm fell away because the group got bought out, they went off and got hired by Cloudflare and the open-source thing kind of was like, oh, we'll continue to run it as open-source a year or two later, like it has fallen apart and it really doesn't have much of any support now at all. So we kind of saw it. That happens with a lot. No one we've seen that happen to, I mean. Which gets a little much. As much as people like, it's still open-source, it's still around. It's like, no, it's not, no one's building it. Yes, as soon as you don't have a business model for it and they actually at the time did, they had a paid service that you could use to sort of host your stuff with them. But as soon as you say like, oh, we're getting rid of all that, but we'll still be open-source. It's like, you have no sustainable revenue, this is gonna fall apart. So, I mean, that gets into the whole like, you know, sustainability of open-source projects and stuff like that. But regardless, that project kind of fell away. We were also playing with one called Cloudron. Cloudron was using Docker containers. It was originally modeled, and I think still many would say is modeled after the idea of like a personal server infrastructure. The idea being that you would install it on a server that you owned, whether that be a provider like DigitalOcean or wherever, and then you could run any apps that you needed to. It used Docker containers, but it supported everything from GitLab to Ghost to, gosh, I don't even remember all the various ones. Etherpad was in there. There was several, they had an app store where you could install container apps. They had Jupyter, they had Jupyter Hub. That's right, yeah. They had, yeah, they had a few good ones. And they had a really nice interface too, for managing all of that. What they didn't have was a model that allowed hosting providers to offer that as a multi-tenant aspect to end users, sort of in that same way. So, while it would work great if I just wanted to run containers, I could install it on a server and run it for myself. It wasn't gonna be something that we were gonna be able to provide to end users, like, hey, you wanna spin up Ghost, here's an easy way to do that. We did play around with it a little bit with one or two different schools. We did some pilot testing. I built an app in there. It was, again, not difficult, but not great. You have to build it on Docker, but using their image. And so you have to build off of their base rather than starting with a Docker file that you might get from any software project or something like that. And so there was still that sort of hook of like, well, you can build for this, but you have to do it in a different way. And the way that they were storing data and user accounts and single sign-on, there was a whole bunch of elements that made building packages for it, still somewhat complicated. It almost, despite it being open-source, it almost feel proprietary because without that image, you couldn't do the rest of the stuff, right? You couldn't just build in all those things. You had to invest the money to build an image that would run on Cloud Run. Right, yeah. And they had a really good library of apps that they had built, so no shame to them, but at the same time, with all of this stuff, we know so many educational apps that'll never show up there unless we build them. I mean, that was the case with Omeca back when we started Reclaim Hosting. It was just sort of like, we built an installer for it and people were like, oh, wow, I can quickly install Omeca. That's, I've not been able to find that with any hosting provider and scaler, same thing. So that sort of sets us apart a little bit and it's also keen to us trying to meet the needs for our community, I think. So Cloud Run, we had played around a little bit. There was some promise there, but frankly, I think the biggest nail in the coffin for it was just the business model wasn't gonna work for us because it didn't set itself up as multi-tenant. There was no way that I was going to give people accounts that would allow them to spin up containers with stuff in there. So we kind of stumbled along and we had decided in this spring that we were gonna get rid of our Cloud Run servers. We were kind of done with that experiment and that brought me to this idea like, oh man, what am I gonna replace it with? I really, I'm always looking out for something and I was like, I would really love to find something and it just, by random happenstance, I came across the term platform as a service. It's P-A-A-S online. And pass, pass. So I started searching for pass solutions on Google and I came across one called Jelastic and I actually came across it because there was a one-click install of it on DigitalOcean in their marketplace and they were like, here's your own platform as a service solution. You can spin it up on DigitalOcean and it provides containerized options for people to run their own software and everything. I was like, well, this sounds interesting. So I started it up on DigitalOcean and immediately from playing in the interface I was like, this is it. I mean, this does allow you to offer to end users the ability to start their own containers. They had a marketplace with pre-built applications. You could create your own, people could create their own packages and distribute them. There was a ton there and it had Docker support. It had Node.js, it had PHP, it had Ruby, it had Go. It had all these different technologies, many of which you couldn't use and Docker being the big one, you know, it was like, wow, there's a lot here and it would really allow us to build out a marketplace of applications that we've never been able to before. So we started playing around with it and at that point we were all in. I mean, it didn't take long for us to realize the potential of it and it met all the needs. I mean, I've built five or six packages already in the last month, which speaks, I think, to just how easy it's been to create packages in this environment. It's just a few lines of code and you really are mostly able to follow the instructions of what the actual software package says on how to install it, like run these three commands, okay, well, I'll just add it into the script and it'll do that as opposed to rebuilding a software package, particularly for a type of environment. And particularly given the last three weeks, we've basically got the software setup on our own servers. We now have three regions in the UK, Canada and the US. So we can geolocate where your server lives or your app lives, which is super cool. But we've also been playing with it. So it's like, it's one thing to say this is awesome. It's another thing to say, okay, let's now see what it's like to work with. And it's interesting because I love it because it has the spectrum. So you can do one click marketplace app which gets you up with an app that you couldn't run in a C-Panel environment. You've got it, you know, how much you're gonna pay. We can talk about vertical and horizontal scaling for resources, but like, that's done. You can step away super solid. But then you can go and say, I wanna build a topology. I wanna build out an environment, a stack, which is a different level of expertise. Or I wanna actually figure out how to run Docker containers in this environment by going out to GitHub or going out to a particular app page and getting their Docker specs and running that. And it's like, you really, the problem almost with the cloud is a problem we have to kind of confront is there's so much possible, how do we guide people through the experience so that they don't go in and just kind of basically get overwhelmed by the technical possibilities. And so that's kind of how we're, you know, cause I think we're pretty convinced the technology is solid and what we can allow people to do is much needed. Now, how do we make it palatable so that when people get in, they get a clean sense of what that is, how they'll approach it, et cetera. So it's an interesting problem now we face. And a good one, a fun one. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think in the early days when I was learning how to build websites and it was like, okay, HTML, I can figure that out. And then it's like CSS. So that's interesting, CSS for layouts. Oh, okay. So now I'm changing the layout, not just the look of it. And then you got into JavaScript and it was like, all of a sudden it was like, now there's JavaScript libraries and like, should I be using this framework? And like people are building whole applications in JavaScript now instead of PHP. And like as the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more complicated it gets and you start to realize there is tons and tons of possibilities. And that can be paralyzing, I think, which is what you're getting at too. It's like you see so many possibilities, you don't know where to even begin. And I think for us, that's gonna be the key here is that like, there are almost limitless possibilities. So we need to help people frame what kind of solutions they're looking for, particularly around education, right? Like what kind of problems are they trying to solve in their classroom? And maybe it's just as simple as they've always wanted to play with ghost and they need an easy way to do it. That's an easy problem to solve. It gets a lot harder when you start thinking through things like, I need a WordPress multi-site that's gonna scale to an institutional level and be able to respond on the fly, whether it's 1,000 people hitting it at once or two and those kind of things. And so the problems can be big or small. And I think for us, it's about framing it for folks and being able to provide those scripted out areas for the stuff where people don't necessarily want to go in. There'll always be developers that know what they're doing and they just really appreciate an environment that gives them the flexibility to do that stuff. But for everybody who's not a developer, which I would almost put myself in that same realm, or people who just kind of dabble in this stuff, I think it's really appreciated to have that those contextual things, the marketplace, the scripted out stuff and the ways in which you can make even the interface a little bit easier for folks to kind of understand mentally and get. Exactly. And I think the other thing that's cool is in Jelastic, you can have the one-click marketplace is like you said, you've already done a shiny apps, our studio, Minecraft, very cool stuff, Etherpad, they have Jitsie, you know what I mean? Like they have the WordPress flavors, ghost, like there's a ton. But the other thing is when you get those more complex apps unlike with something like Cloud Run or even Sandstorm, you actually have server level access to them. Like you can SSHN, you can FTP, like you can really work on the kind of what feels like at terminal, on the bare metal of the server or of the container you're working through, which for me is a radical departure from any environment we've thought about providing previously. And that's been gigantic. No, I mean, we always think to the support ticket we get where someone's like, I'm trying to do like a pseudo root access and I can't, how do I do that? And you're like, we'll know you can't because you're a lowly end user and I'm the administrator, right? And that's always been the dynamic there. So for somebody to be able to say, hey, I want to run a Ubuntu server and it says, okay, here's your root password credentials and all that, have fun. And it's like, oh, okay, they really do have full access, you know, in a secure way within the container that they started, but yeah, full privileges to be able to do what they need to do, which I think is going to be really empowering for particular types of applications that need that. Exactly. In particular, I mean, because part of what we were riffing on in the last, I would say month, month and a half as we were building up to this was the perceived and the documented need for a container-based infrastructure from particular groups within universities. I'm thinking of the digital humanities groups, but I think there's a broader the sciences groups. So those groups that really need to start, working with and exploring these new technologies based on the fact that they have real infrastructural limits at their universities or as part of their organizations. And it makes sense because it's very hard for an IT organization to support everything, right? And so for us, we knew it was gonna be somewhat niche just like Domain of One's Own was somewhat niche. And I think that's exciting because it fits within our strengths, the ability to provide a unique environment to help people think it through and then to support them when they need it. So it's a very nice building upon what we did and that's why it feels both of a piece but yet a very dramatic jump in what we're able to provide a broader community of higher ed and educators in general and even beyond. But that's to me where it's very much of a piece. Now, we did have some struggles with an aesthetic. We have been, I did before I get into this, am I cutting you off on anything or no? No, not at all. No, I think it's true. It's sort of like with the aesthetic stuff, we've always I think shied away from the shiny, right? From the glorious like, oh, it's all just out there and perfect. And I think we've kind of railed against that. And like when you've talked about trailing edge technology, like the fact that the stuff isn't new and we're not, I don't think we're not trying to approach this and say Docker is new. I've been playing with it since 2014. I think container-based solutions and the way we do hosting, like this stuff isn't necessarily new. It's the way we're trying to help frame it and provide it as a service to education. So what does that look like in terms of an aesthetic then? Yeah, and it's interesting because we've also, we've had a lot of fun with our aesthetic at Reclaim hosting. We've started with the independent record store. We then kind of evolved into a VHS store, which has been a lot of fun and a lot of routes, even with the physical kind of exhibits of that with Reclaim video. But we decided working with Brian Mathers that with this one, Tim and I talked with the great artist, Brian Mathers, who's done most of our artwork up till today. We started brainstorming a couple of other ideas, right? One of them, which I really liked was the idea of a more traditional Docker-based container. And let me see if I can find this art. I have the other art, but maybe I can find this art too. Yeah, because you're right. Like the whole Docker ecosystem is very nautical, right? Like it's, I mean, the idea of Docker containers are talking about shipping containers. And then you've got Kubernetes, which is, I forget even what, it's a Greek term and I can't remember what it stands for, but it's very much nautical related. You're making helm documents and everything is very shipping related and pretty much every service that builds around Docker tries to tie into that same sort of nautical realm. There's Docker Swarms and all this other stuff. So I don't know. But at the same time, the nautical thing is kind of like, okay, that's different. I don't know that I would say like, oh, Reclaim Hosting, very nautical. We're known for our nautical. That's right. Our uniforms are now gonna be like maybe a tire. So I'm finding this right now from Brian. I wanna show off, basically what I'm about to show is pretty cool. It's Brian's first run at a couple of concepts. And I am gonna, yeah, actually I got it. I'm gonna just open it in the browser. And Brian, I think, does a really good idea of always trying to tie things back to previous metaphors too, right? So like, he was thinking about mix tapes and he was thinking about the records and the videos and all of those things in that light as well, which I appreciate because it does start to tell that story for us too. And I like that. Yeah, so here it is, I have it. Let me share this. These are the early sketches. And I think both Tim and I truly enjoy Brian's stuff. Can you see that? Yep. Okay, so here's the sketches. And one of them was just kind of funny, right Tim? He did this one about social distancing. All the social distancing. With a big sombrero to define, which actually is nice because it really like, contextualizes our thinking in these conversations that we were still so deep in COVID-19 or not. That's right, yeah. We were still really like, whoa. But here is, and I love this one. This is the reclaimed container ship with VHS tapes as the actual containers. Probably not something we could do much with, but I just love them for like a talk about what containers are and the way, like you said, he's able to bring our old art consistent with the new. Yeah, for sure. And so I really did, I love them, even though we decided not to go with that aesthetic, we'll still use it. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's great. The other one we talked about, and this is really where Tim was like, because I've been known over the years to be a one-trick pony, which is true. And I talked about the idea of the domain and the house and all the different rooms in the house as subdomains. And so one of the things, as we were talking through other options, we talked about something from the UMW Domain's Days called Cloud City, which is a reference to Star Wars and Bespin and the whole kind of Empire Strikes Back city. And the idea was, could we do something with what we had already done there, which was an art, was a picture that Martha Burtis photoshopped. That I really loved the way it evoked. But once we started talking about that, Tim was like, well, let's think more about what a home of the future would look like, which brought up questions of Jetsons and all of that, which was really cool. And so when we saw this idea of these homes automatically scaling up and down and that being your domain, I think Tim and I were like, yeah, I think we can see this. And it's also playing with that 60s futurism or retro futurism of like, yes, everything will be great in the future. And I think one of the things we all talk about is, well, will it? Exactly. So, and I think this is the one we ultimately will go with and we'll show you where we've gone from here. But I did like, that's a really good idea. We liked the mushroom like city, although this icon for the reclaimed cloud city, we wanted to think through it and we did. But the final one was the mixtape. And the idea of what it would mean to go with the mixtape. And while we both liked it, it just the tape kind of idea, the analog idea just did not work with the cloud at all, right? It just was not something we could... And when you talked about cloud city, and of course with it being called reclaimed cloud, that was a natural fit. But when you talk about cloud city and you start to make the metaphor to Star Wars, and I'm not a Star Wars guy. And I imagine I'm not alone in that. And so like, I've always struggled. Well, you are actually. I'm alone. Yeah. I mean, I know I'm in the minority. I hope I'm not completely alone. You're almost alone. But you know, and so like, I struggled a little bit with that because I was just like, I don't know much about Star Wars and that kind of thing. But when we talk about like the Jetsons, and even before the Jetsons, the whole idea of that retro futurism and space age like aspect, that era of time. It's almost like we started in the 80s and now we're going even further back. And I love that. And I love the idea that we're going back to a time and that's what really ties into me. I've always, you know, I love Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World, you know, and I love going there. They've got the carousel of progress. And like, I just imagine growing up in a time where you got to go to a world fair and see what's possible, right? Like this is what the future is going to look like. And sometimes it's completely absurd. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, the most outlandish things, you know, and you'll find drawings of like a postal service person with a jet pack delivering paper mails to someone. And you're just like, that's so silly, but it's also fun, right? Like it's also like to have that idea of just like, you know, the rocketeer and just like the anything's possible kind of magical mentality, I think is a lot of fun. And there's certainly criticisms to be had around the whole idea of it. But at the same time, I think we can have a lot of fun with it and we can really push the boundaries and say, you know, this is anything's possible in Reclaim Cloud. And it's almost that that bumbling fool where, you know, nothing ever actually works, right? Because some of the stuff is difficult, but there are attempts to automate it. There are attempts to scale it up. And there's lots of, you know, houses in the cloud, you know, and those kinds of things. So I'm having a lot of fun already just trying to think through some of those metaphors. Exactly. And there's the whole thing that we started with or that you came to us with. And I'm trying to find, what's the name of that document where you put in all the images from closer than we think? I'd have to find it. I can share my screen if I find it. Let me see, because I'm searching my Reclaim domains. And is it closer than you think or closer than we think? Closer than we think. Yeah, and that was a series done in the late 50s, early 60s. Yeah. It's crazy. Our concept ideas. And it was basically in newspapers. And we'll share this here shortly so you can see. I can share it on my screen. I've got it over. Oh, you have it. Yeah, I do. Yeah, let's look at that. I want to see that. Concept ideas. So the idea here is this is some of the retrofuturism which wasn't retrofuturism then. In the 1950s, this idea of a sense of what a future city might look like. Yeah, so this was a guy, Arthur Rattaball, who did these. And you'll see illustrated, there's the post office guy with the jetpack on it. But these would come out in the Sunday newspaper. And this was sort of a weekly thing. And you can see next week, wall in the sky down there at the bottom. Like each week, they would come up with this idea of something that on the face of it now, in hindsight, it's like, well, that's pretty absurd. But there's little elements of truth in it too. It's sort of like, oh, the one-world job market where people will call in by video and talk to others through a camera. And good Lord, like here we are talking, several countries, hundreds of thousands of miles away. Like one of Harry's employer. Yeah. Philadelphia on screen, I love that. Yeah, and look at this, like ramps and apartments and stuff. And so we were starting to glean some ideas from that whole aesthetic and the idea of, sort of narrating the possibilities of the future in a way that people could maybe understand or maybe even just try and believe in, which I think is really cool. So, you know. Which kind of ties into some of the idea of utopian tendencies that Lauren Haywood have been talking through. Like there is a tendency towards utopia when talking about the future. And I think that has to be, that's part of the excitement, but that also has to be approached carefully and critically. And so like that's what I really like about this aesthetic though is it kind of, it asks us to be hopeful, but yet recognize we're in a moment of tumult and change and some of the like age old structures have not served everyone well. So it's interesting. I mean, in that regard too. I'm just realizing that on the screencast it's not picking up, there we go. Sorry, I didn't realize on Jitsie I've got to click my screen. So I'll go back up here to the top and just show very briefly the images I was showing. You could see them, but yeah. So these are the images just to recap there. And you can see the guy on the jet pack there and the closer than we think. And the cool thing too. Yeah, and the cool thing too is with the closer than we think you can see it's like a panel and a paper. Almost like a comic, but yet also like a kind of infomercial, right? Like of like, here's what's possible. Right, with the arrows and yeah. And there's a bit of like a travel log to it like a brochure for what the future could look like and come, you know, it's pretty cool. Yeah, and then you'd put some images in here by Robert McCall. Yeah, I love the way in which his buildings look. Yeah. He has the spherical cloud based cities almost, which I think works really well for our aesthetic too, right? Like the idea of a container and encapsulation and how do you communicate that to a, basically how does your aesthetic help teach people what they're getting into? Yeah. So this is cool because now I'm gonna share my screen. We had our first round with, I mean, and it is such a joy to work with Brian Mathers. If you ever get the chance, please do. But here is the Explore, reclaim your adventure. Explore Cloud City, can you see that Tim? Yep, absolutely. So this kind of, and I love this image, I just love it. It kind of gets at the idea of both it being cinematic where you see the heads in the front looking out. I think the colors are just like spot on, perfect. And you'll notice as Tim was talking about with that motel and the curving ramps and the scaling, but also like the kind of a bit of off, like cause everything, maybe every building has its own dimension, its own stack, right? Its own like way of dealing with it. It really does try and get at this notion of it. It's self-contained, right? And this notion of like, is this a space to explore? Is this a brochure where we're trying to tell people come to Cloud City, explore what's possible? And Cloud City will be known as Explore Reclaim Cloud, right? So it's kind of nice. This is the art before we actually frame it and brand it. But I just really, this for me when I saw this, Tim, I was just like, yep, that's it, we got it. And it's almost a play on propaganda, right? Like as you look through some of the older stuff, it's almost, it's propaganda-like in that it's just like, oh, everything's gonna be wonderful and everything's perfect. And I think we can play with that a little bit and be like, come to Reclaim Cloud where the life is perfect or whatever. And then you have things falling apart in the background sometimes or things aren't quite necessarily perfect, but everything's glass and that kind of stuff. So I love that. I think it's really super cool. And this is really cool as an idea of traveling because I think for a lot of people, this is gonna be traveling to something new, right? This is, we're even seeing that even amongst our staff and even myself personally, it's exploring things that really push the boundaries of my own thinking. And so that's a tough place to be in. And if you can kind of lower the expectations a little bit, if you can make it less pressure and just say like, hey, this is gonna be fun, in fact. This is, you know, things may go wrong and that's okay, but this can be fun. And we're gonna be here alongside you helping contextualize and frame it for you. I think that's where it gets really exciting. And for some ad tech, you would imagine like this would be a welcome space to explore some of the possibilities. And hopefully one where you can come and join a community, get help in forums and kind of get a sense of what's possible and what you could bring to your institution or your organization or whatever. And what does that mean? Like it's kind of like where at reclaim, I mean, where at UMW we were with C-Panel in 2005, 2004, right? Like that notion of what can we deliver? What can we bring to campus to open up a various options? So here's another one. And I don't know if you can see this full screen, but it's just gorgeous. Like the idea of the text on the side and the whole idea of reclaiming the sense of the cloud and then talking about nodes and we'll use these diagrams as well to hopefully be informational. And Tim and I have to write up and we may bring in folks who are also interested writing up like scenarios for a particular like software and trying to make the metaphor and the analogy to a home, right? Like what would it be like with your video system and then replace Jitsi with that? Your audio system, talk about a ZoraCast and your story system, talk about like Minio or something else. Like all of these things you need to do in your kind of physical like abodes, you also need to think about digitally for your content, your data, your representation. And so using these little panels to make those arguments will be super fun. And so we see this as a kind of long-term project and collaboration with Brian to build out this kind of overarching aesthetic of the cloud, which I am so freaking excited about, right? I mean, really. And then finally, this is the first iteration of our logo. We've already changed bits of it, but you get a sense. And I actually really like the logo in the way in which the city is almost like the Blade Runner city from the Ridley Scott one in the early 80s. And then it also has that kind of sense of the sphere and the idea of the two moons of Tatooine to go back to Star Wars. I mean, there's a lot there in terms of just like the idea of the future, but yet also this almost like Alcoa old school industrial like logo. Yeah, you've got the art deco style there. You've got the stack right in the middle, right? Like, so there's your load balancer app server database, like, you know, like, and so the idea of the house is a stack too, or as a scaling application with multiple application servers. So like in a very like almost a very like modern way, it's also like encapsulating a lot of different ideas in something with simple shapes, which I think is a lot of fun. And we have always tried to lead from, I don't know if I'm back, do I get rid of that? No, you got to stop your sharing. There we go. But we've always tried to lead to some degree with the art. And not, I mean, we got to lead with something to share, right, there is that. But this idea of having good solid metaphorical representations of what it is we're trying to do. And I think it's kind of been, well, I know, I think I could speak for me and you, it's been super exciting trying to do some of that and kind of work through that so that what we said, and you said this brilliantly, so I'll take the royal we out of it. Our job in this is to try and help institutions, individuals, students, faculty comprehend and begin to wrap their head around the options. And how we navigate that is really the thing we are trying desperately to figure out over the next few months as we roll this out and make it an offering. So what all have we started running on it? So like for one, I'll just say right now, this meeting that we're having is on Reclaim Cloud. So this is a Jitsi meat instance that we have up and running internally for Reclaim Hosting. You're broadcasting to a radio station that we created for Reclaim Hosting called Reclaim Radio, and that's using a ZuraCast. So that's in there. Our community forums running discourse are on there. Your blog as well as mine, yours is a WordPress blog and mine is a Ghost blog. Those are both on there and yours is actually a pretty advanced one, right? So it's not just a patchy PHP. It's a cluster. MySQL, it's a cluster, yeah. So multiple app servers, a cluster database, network attached storage, like. Yeah, and we moved DS106 was my first project besides Baba Tuesdays, and that was a bear. But that runs cleanly in the cloud. And it's a lot. I mean, there's a lot to run on that. We're also doing Minio, which is object-based storage. You pushed me to that. And so instead of backing up directly to Amazon S3, everything on my blog, it's going to Minio, which is a storage container I have separate from my blog, which is brilliant. I have basically an Apache server. I have the DS106.club running in a VPS. The old-school Tilda Spaces, right? Yeah, yeah. So we, I mean, I think I have, I also have an Etherpad set up. I created an Etherpad for Reclaim Hosting too, and I played around a little bit with it and it looks pretty nice, yeah. It's nice, yeah. And I think what else have I played with? Jitzy too, I have my own Jitzy instance. I did the radio, the discourse. I'm interested in, I know somebody else where in the community- Jupiter. Jupiter notebooks, yeah. I did the one that Tony Hearst set up. Yeah, I set it up. So that was an example where he had built a script and you were able to just copy and paste it in and that installed his classroom environment of it, right? Exactly. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And it runs on very few cloudlets. I think two or three cloudlets. Really minimal resource usage. Now I didn't do much with it, but that was super cool to see. Yeah, there's somebody in the community who was looking at Mattermost and that's one that I would like to try as well. I know it's definitely possible. I just haven't gotten around to it, in part because for us internally, we use Slack right now. And I think one of the cool things that this calls into question is like, what are good open source apps that are out there that you could maybe replace a commercial offering with? For us, we live and die by Slack, but if we had all the same functionality and we didn't, I mean, our bill is up to, I think, almost 2000 a year for the number of users we have in Slack. And it's like, huh, what if we could run it on our own just like we're running Jitzi instead of paying for Zoom? What if instead of, you know, and I won't go as far as saying like, instead of G Suite, that would be a huge move and running everything internally. There's always that gray area of how much you're willing to give up, but some of these open source apps, man, like we're talking about Jitzi, like, I love it. I mean, matter most the same way, there's so many plugins and things and the interface is so very similar to the way Slack works. So you're almost like, well, if it was easy to run it, then maybe I would. And so, yeah. Even with the email when Lauren brought up CrossBox, I was thinking to myself like at 14 bucks a month, you know, based on what we're paying, not that I want to go down the email. I have no enough in C-Pile email to know I don't want to administer email, but the idea now that we have this cloud and we see what it can do, it doesn't seem crazy anymore. And I know a lot of people have used like Next Cloud as an alternative to Dropbox. And so, you know, which is great, but again, like on shared hosting, you're kind of limited in space, whereas with this, you'd have cloud storage that could scale up as you use it and you would be paying pennies per gigabyte. And so that then offers the option like, oh, okay, so really I could have Dropbox without the actual space limitations and I could use it for other things too. And I know Next Cloud has its own whole plug-in interface and I know people doing calendaring and mail and all kinds of different stuff through there as well. I'm really making it an organizational thing too. So I'm interested to start looking at those, yeah. I think that's where I've been really impressed and I've followed very closely the open ETC work in British Columbia with Grant and Brian Lam and Tannis Morgan and Clint Lalonde and many others. Ann Marie Scott, I know is involved now. Like that's a really compelling model and it's limited to BC given the politics and who's funding it and that's great. Like because they can build a commune around that. But like what would it be like to model some of that stuff on top of like, what an open source and we've talked about it. Like what is an open source like recipe look like for running a course kind of like what Duke was talking about with their kits, right? Like what would an next generation course look like in the cloud and that might be one way for us to control and focus in on that experience rather and say do whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. You gotta really be specific. Like you said, Omega and WordPress is why reclimb hosting is still around. Right, yeah. So what is gonna be those applications that enough folks see value in and wanna use and have no easy way to run right now? Yeah, to me. Which is a really good question. Yeah, I think it's the building blocks of that next generation digital learning environment which you've talked about extensively and others have as well too. It's sort of like, it's one thing to think, what does it look like to not just be tied to doing everything in the LMS or doing everything with an institutional product but to really extract yourselves. And it's almost like the institution is almost like the vendor there and you're trying to extract yourself from them and say, what does it look like for me to use the tools that I'm running and I have control over? It's gotta be in a way that it's easy enough for students and for faculty to use and to manage. And so there are pieces to that as well. But as you start to see those building blocks and go, oh, I could run MatterMost for my synchronous stuff or my asynchronous chat and those kind of things. I could run a jitzy instance for the real-time stuff and do the recordings and those kind of things. I could run an etherpad instance and we could all collaborate on a document together. And I could do those for an hour here, an hour there and save some money or I could keep them up and running and run it as a classroom. I could do it as an ed tech for my institution even and do it at that scale. And it could scale as small or as large as need be I think is a really powerful thing. So I'm super excited. Yeah, I agree. And I think it has collaboration options and ways, things we just couldn't do in the infrastructure and feed panel. So it's super exciting. We're on an hour. And I think we made the most of the hour. We promised to keep it to just about that. And it's been good. I mean, just to be honest, right? We've just not had the time to sit down and chat about this, but we always find it very useful and helpful for our own work and for our own reflection back when we work on a project or even see where this has gone from where it started is this is really in its inception, right? Like where a month, a month in change into actually having learned about Jelastic and now we have a full blown infrastructure up and running, which is amazing. And we're gonna do our open public beta starting July 1st. So like that's coming in about a week. That's right, yeah. And people will be able to go to reclaim.cloud. If they wanna get on the list ahead of time, they can sign up there to be notified. But as of July 1st, we will have some signups open for an open beta. And we're hoping to launch commercially at the end of July. So yeah, pretty fast track, hoping to provide something for educators to hopefully find use for maybe even for this fall and beyond. So yeah, it's been. It's a good way to celebrate reclaim seventh birthday. That's true. Yeah, absolutely. And how far we've come. So yeah, I'm excited by it. We'll obviously be talking more and more about it in the coming weeks and months to come. You know, it's sort of consumed our life already and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. So, but that's a really good thing because there's a lot of possibilities in there. So it's closer than we think. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Thank you everybody who is listening along, watching us, all that kind of stuff. And we will see you all later. Yeah, the clip's up. Bye. Ciao, ciao.