Episode 204: FOSSY 2023 with Adam Monsen

Guest Adam Monsen Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and
welcome to Sustain! Richard is in Portland at FOSSY, the Free and
Open Source Software Yearly conference that is held by the Software
Freedom Conservancy. In today’s episode, Richard is joined by Adam
Monsen, co-founder of the open source conference, SeaGL, and author
of the soon-to-be-published book, Steadfast Self-Hosting:
Rapid-Rise Personal Cloud, which aims to guide individuals and
groups towards personal data control, an important step towards
autonomy, agency, and freedom. The discussion highlights the value
of self-hosting data, its potential applications, and the benefits
it can bring to small and mid-sized businesses. Adam shares that
his book is free and open for remixing and reprinting, and it will
not only be a guide but also serve as a starting point for tech
authors. Hit download now to hear more! [00:01:36] Adam talks about
his book which aims to guide people on how to maintain control over
their personal data. [00:02:33] The conversation moves towards the
difficulties faced while extracting personal data from large tech
companies, and Adam suggests the use of open source servers and
software like Nextcloud to migrate data. [00:03:31] Adam mentions
that the first step towards data sovereignty could be purchasing
his book, which provides guidance on setting up personal servers
and services. [00:06:11] Why did Adam write this book? He explains
why and shares his experience with self-hosting data for his family
and emphasizes that doing this for a group can be empowering and
meaningful. [00:07:27] Richard brings up the shift from cloud to
self-hosting by Basecamp and he wonders if Adam thought about
pitching any of his book towards businesses to host their own data.
[00:09:53] Richard mentions a group in the UK working to create a
standard for APIs to allow users to extract their data from big
tech companies and maintain ownership. [00:11:11] Adam affirms his
willingness to contribute and underscores the value of individual
data ownership, using healthcare records as an example of a system
that could greatly benefit from more seamless data sharing.
[00:12:12] Richard brings up the topic of digital sovereignty, and
Adam tells us his view that data sovereignty should be more about
serving individuals and small groups, transcending politics, and
should be capable of crossing borders. [00:13:52] Adam tells us
where you can find his book online and he reveals that the book
will serve as a starting point for tech authors who are stuck or
uncertain about where you begin. Also, the book build system itself
will be free and open source. Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] RICHARD
LITTAUER: Hello and welcome to Sustain. I am here again at FOSSY,
the Free and Open-Source Software Conference Yearly run by Software
Freedom Conservancy. This is its first year and I'm here in
Portland, Oregon, which is just completely sunny. It's amazing.
It's actually really nice, especially as Vermont is entirely
underwater. But yeah, it's just good to be here and I'm here with a
guest today. I'm Richard Littauer (if you didn't know that already)
and my guest today is Adam Monsen coming down from Seattle. Adam,
how are you doing? ADAM MONSEN: Doing very well, Richard. Thank you
for having me. RICHARD LITTAUER: Thank you for coming on. So Adam,
we just had a short chat before the podcast. Super cool. One of the
founders of SeaGL, which is probably one of my favorite
conferences. Free, every time. Stuff that people are passionate
about. Seattle GNU/Linux Conference. It doesn't just mean GNU/Linux
it means all of open source as a seagull as their mascot. Is it a
glaucous-winged gull or an Olympic gull or a Herring gull? Do you
have a species definition for that? ADAM MONSEN: (laughs) I have no
idea. RICHARD LITTAUER: Okay, cool. Anything I missed when
describing SeaGL? ADAM MONSEN: You nailed it. RICHARD LITTAUER:
Excellent. That's because it's amazing. It's coming out November
11th. It's going to be the 11th time. ADAM MONSEN: Back in person
at the UW. RICHARD LITTAUER: U-DUB! Two fireplaces this year. Very
exciting. Salt was keen to share that. So, Adam is one of the
drivers behind that. We've already talked about that on the podcast
before. Go back to Deb Nicholson's episode, one of the early ones
to hear more about that. We're probably going to have another
episode coming out in October to remind you to go to this
free-to-attend virtual or in-person conference. Super exciting.
Adam, let's focus on some other stuff. I know you're an author.
What's the book you're working on? ADAM MONSEN: I'm calling it
Steadfast Self-Hosting: Rapid-Rise Personal Cloud. It's a manifesto
for people who care about having their own data. Not necessarily
for privacy, although that's a common motive. The fundamental
theory I'm trying to push forward this concept of data sovereignty,
I didn't make it up, but the idea is you have your own data for not
just you, your small group, your family, your community, your
project, your school. And with that, you gain power, autonomy,
agency, freedom--for the idealistic stance--but, the approach is
very practical, very pragmatic. RICHARD LITTAUER: So I love that
concept. In practice, it's very difficult to get your data out of
any of the monoliths-- ADAM MONSEN: It is. RICHARD LITTAUER: --that
currently exist. And it's also difficult to have the tools
necessary to effectively mine the data in the way that's
immediately useful for you. Can you tell me how you take that extra
step of saying "get your own data" to, "oh, this is actually kind
of cool and useful and fun." ADAM MONSEN: Yeah. There's no wrong
place to start, but it's worth it. It's a worthwhile journey. It's
something that's worth debating and questioning. It can be hard.
Lately, it's become quite a bit easier. You can take out your data
from quite a few places, and migration into different FOSS servers
is possible and supported and encouraged quite a bit. I focus on
Nextcloud quite a bit--no affiliation--but I think their software
is great for hosting and sharing your own files, and they have a
connector to grab your data off any of the big public clouds, for
example. You can just migrate it right in, and they help you do
that right in the software. RICHARD LITTAUER: Is [Nextcloud] the
same as Vercel? ADAM MONSEN: Nextcloud was a fork of ownCloud.
RICHARD LITTAUER: Okay, different. Okay, got it. ADAM MONSEN: It
gives you like kind of a drop, your own Dropbox or a Google Drive,
that kind of thing. RICHARD LITTAUER: It's great that you tell me
how to do it easily. What's the first step that I would want to do
as a naive user trying to own my own data? How would I get started?
ADAM MONSEN: Get my book. RICHARD LITTAUER: Okay. For sure. Very
good pitching. ADAM MONSEN: Well, it is hard to know where to
start. It's not that hard to start, but there's so many choices out
there that it's hard to know what to start with and what's worth
your time. So that's what I focus on in the book. It's designed to
be not too long, not comprehensive. It's not like a massive Linux
"how to do everything to a server" manual. It's what you need to do
to help the people you care about, your group, help them own their
data, help them migrate it in and whatnot. And the first step to
that is you have to get a piece of hardware and stand up some
services so they can use it, so they can put it behind their phone.
Their phone can talk to it rather than a big public cloud, you're
locked in, whatnot. You want to have your data for you to pass on.
We work hard to curate our data. So the idea is you could get my
book and get a start at setting up your own server and services for
your group. RICHARD LITTAUER: I've never thought about self-hosting
my eBird data first and then using APIs to submit it afterwards.
ADAM MONSEN: Would that change the way you think about your data or
what kind of things you'd start? RICHARD LITTAUER: It would give me
a whole lot closer towards building my app so when I'm birding on
the highway, which you shouldn't ever do, drive responsibly people.
ADAM MONSEN: Don't do that. RICHARD LITTAUER: You could just click
a button and say, saw a crow at this time, it'll log the location
and then it'll save it on my-- anyway, that's just where my brain
went. Long time listeners, I apologize for bringing up birds yet
again. ADAM MONSEN: There's lots of reasons to do it though, right?
There's a chilling effect when you're trying to share something
sensitive with a friend and you usually just give in to like, okay,
here's the doc, here's the link. RICHARD LITTAUER: I use Signal as
much as I can. ADAM MONSEN: Great! RICHARD LITTAUER: But after
that, like docs, like I use Google Docs for this podcast. I really
should be using Cryptpad. Don't know why I don't. I just haven't
made that switch yet. ADAM MONSEN: Slightly harder, right? Slightly
more hassle and then somebody else sees it and they're a little
slightly more confused. I think Nextcloud is one tool that's, it
just, it's kind of the current thing that fits that gap, but it
does that for a lot of people. It can bring you up to speed by
showing you familiar interfaces. Oh, here's a doc, here's a
document and I can get at it from the web or from a mobile device
and I don't care where it's stored. But in this case, great. You've
done the work ahead of time to set up a server and services. So,
you can trust where it is served and it works quite well. I would
say for me, I trust it more. It's more robust than when I did put
things in the public cloud. I try not to, but again, you asked like
where to start, why... nobody's 100% anything. It's worth working
on, I would say. RICHARD LITTAUER: So you're an author. Is this
your first book? ADAM MONSEN: Yeah. RICHARD LITTAUER: Exciting. Why
are you an authority on this subject? ADAM MONSEN: I've been
curious for quite a while. I've been in tech for quite a while and
done different things, used other people's servers. I've
self-hosted quite a bit over-- for decades, but never, I guess I
would say, committed my family to going along with it, going along
with this with me. And they agreed to, and I said, I'll stand this
up and you can use it and we'll talk through what, I think that is
just a key part. Like if it's just for you, I don't care, man. It's
like everybody, them their own, that's great. But when it's a
group, it can be very empowering. It's more meaningful, honestly,
when you're doing it for more than one person. You share. So what I
did was I stood this up, I took the time to do it right and I kept
it going. I wanted no unplanned outages for a couple years. I tried
to treat it like a real server where I've got customers and
everything. Well, my customers are right in the house with me. And
I already care about them. So that made it easy to-- RICHARD
LITTAUER: 24 seven hour complaint line right there. ADAM MONSEN:
(laughs) Luckily not too many. They're very understanding. They
give me a lot of leniency, but they do make use of it also. They're
the reason I'm doing this. And I hope they agree when they come see
my talk tomorrow. RICHARD LITTAUER: Segwaying a bit. Love that.
It's great. Basecamp recently said that they've switched from being
in the cloud to hosting their own servers. And as a result, they're
saving $7 million over the next five years because the cloud never
works for them. That's a business operation. That's a business
shift. And, you know, I used to host another podcast called
Community to Cloud Native where I talked about the cloud and I sort
of stopped doing it at some point. But I'm just curious, have you
thought about pitching any of the book towards businesses to host
their own data as opposed to just individuals? ADAM MONSEN: Yeah, I
think businesses are well aware. You know, when they, at least the
ones I've been in, we would always start with needs, budget, and
then cost against cloud and self. And generally it comes to cloud
hosting because of the convenience. You're just, yeah, I don't care
where the servers are, the power, this and that. And then you kind
of short-term jump on it. And then you're not thinking long term
because, yeah, I think it is generally a short term play just to
throw it in the cloud. And I'm not surprised that Basecamp is
saving millions. Other companies, it seems like they get big enough
and they have enough commute, compute needs. It's usually compute,
not storage that tips them over into hosting their own. But I think
the concepts are useful to businesses. I think people working in
these bigger businesses, let's say midsize, maybe a little beyond
startup, but they are probably already familiar. And those people
doing their sysadmin, admin-ing their cloud servers and such, they
should walk through this exercise too. They should have a home lab.
They should practice this stuff. They need to learn the
fundamentals of sysadmin and containers and all the different ways
to host and stuff like that. So I think they could find a lot of
use out of this. I don't address businesses directly in this book,
but I think SOHO, small office, home office, smaller businesses
could definitely make use of this kind of technology just to have
their own cloud, have their own cloud, have their own data and the
agency that goes along with that. RICHARD LITTAUER: I'm not an
industry expert on this, so this question may be naive. Would there
be any benefit towards various small organizations and SMBs funding
a cooperative data lake-type thing as opposed to going with allowed
cloud foundries, which are going to charge more because they can,
even though at scale they may actually have lower operating costs.
Is there any reason to think about running together with other
companies to have your own open source data? ADAM MONSEN: Yeah, for
sure. And not my area of expertise, but I would say for sure.
Co-ops are great. A number of people here at FOSSY are involved in
or running co-ops. RICHARD LITTAUER: There's a group in the UK
called Redecentralize that's been working for the past 5, 10 years
on trying to find other ways to access and enable and make a
standard of APIs between all the large data giants, Facebook,
Twitter, Google, so you can actually take your data out of these
things and also put them back in if you want, where it's much more
plug and play, but you're the person who owns your data, kind of
like you can go to the doctor's office and say, I want all my
records and then take them physically out and hand them to your
next doctor, which most people aren't aware. I'm curious, given
that you're interested in helping people make the shift towards
owning their own data, being sovereign of their own world, have you
thought about sitting on any sort of nonprofit board or working for
any of this sort of Redecentralize-type stuff to see how we can
make a sea change to actually enable better API usage so we can get
our data out of other companies? ADAM MONSEN: I haven't, but if
they want me, I'm game, yeah, for sure. That's awesome.
Compatibility is a huge thing. Interoperability. It flies in the
face of walled gardens, lock-in, so that's amazing. Do companies
participate in this or is it more a third-party effort? RICHARD
LITTAUER: More a third-party effort, foundation-type effort, just
trying to figure this stuff out. I was just curious where you were
sitting on any of those sort of discussions if you're helping out.
ADAM MONSEN: No, I would though. That's another great thing that we
should question, we should work on because our data is our own. I'm
glad you brought up healthcare too. I mean, health records, I don't
know. RICHARD LITTAUER: Tragedy. ADAM MONSEN: My gods. Every time I
go to the doctor, I have to gather my own. You'd think that you
just, "oh, can you talk to my last doctor and get that?" "Well,
kind of." You do a records request, it's cumbersome, and I've heard
in other countries that there are APIs and you have the right to
request and not just they send you a CD or a huge sheet of paper,
you get digital access. There are free software EHRs that are very
interesting. I want to use that. I haven't yet, but I definitely
want to gather my own data. And then when I go to the next doctor,
it's just like, oh, here's the stuff you need to help me with this
problem right now. Sheesh. Not just for myself too. People I care
for, I mean, I'd want to-- the same power. RICHARD LITTAUER: One
more weird question, which is you mentioned the word sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty is normally used in open source spaces to mean
a lack of reliance on another country's technical prowess. So for
instance, the Sovereign Tech Fund coming out of Germany, which is
an idea to basically try and make Germany less reliant on American
tech. Now, this could lead towards a balkanization of the space.
That's not the goal, but it's one of the ways that the messaging is
often used to get politicians to go along with having sovereignty.
So I'm curious where you sit on the libertarian access of owning
your own data and being sovereign as an individual versus actually
thinking about being part of the same team as everyone else and
working together to improve data access for everyone using current
platforms. ADAM MONSEN: I think to me, the free software problem or
the struggle, has always been international. And I love the idea
that if I'm solving a problem in my own country, it crosses borders
quite freely. So I'm hoping that my use of the term data
sovereignty can overcome theirs. But no, I was not aware of that.
And that's, yeah, I mean, politics will always come into it. But
no, I think this is this, why one would hope this would transcend
politics and serve individuals and groups, small groups. But I've
heard about government switching to free and open source software.
And I mean, how wonderful that public code, public funds, public
code, that kind of effort is so inspiring. I mean, it makes quite a
bit of sense. RICHARD LITTAUER: Thank you for dealing with my
hardball. Sorry to ask difficult questions. ADAM MONSEN: Keep
bringing it, keep it coming. I love it. RICHARD LITTAUER: Well,
actually we are running up on time. So I have a few more questions
for you. One of them: where can people find this book? ADAM MONSEN:
adammonsen.com, A-D-A-M M-O-N-S-E-N dot com is a good place to
start. I'll keep updates going there. I don't have the website up
for the book yet. It is content complete. Now I'm in editing and
tech review that kind of, thank you. RICHARD LITTAUER: That's a lot
of work. Good job. ADAM MONSEN: It's not a huge book. So part of
the idea is to run 100 pages printed right now. And I want to stay
there, but I want people to be able to get print copies. And I'm
working on publishing and distribution. If you're a publisher,
actually, please contact me. That could be interesting, but so far
I'm planning on self-publishing. And the book itself--I think this
is significant--the book itself is free and open. You can remix.
You can rebuild. You can reprint, even. The licenses will be pretty
clear in there and hopefully very amenable to sharing. Because I
also want to help other tech authors that are stuck, stumbling, not
sure where to start. This is a starting point. The book build
system itself is going to be Free and Open Source Software. You can
build your own book with it. You could fill in the chapters and
start your own. Thank you Richard so much for the time to talk.
RICHARD LITTAUER: You already answered my second question, which is
I can find you at adammonsen.com. Any other socials you want to
plug? ADAM MONSEN: Nope. RICHARD LITTAUER: All right. Well, thank
you so much. You can find that link also in the show notes. Adam,
thanks for taking the time today. Good luck with the book! ADAM
MONSEN: Thank you, Richard. RICHARD LITTAUER: Listeners, I hope you
have enjoyed this podcast. If you're curious about FOSSY, where
these were recorded, go to sfconservancy.org to the Software
Freedom Conservancy's website, where you can learn more about it.
It's been really, really fun to be here and have these great
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take care. Bye! [MUSIC PLAYING] Links SustainOSS
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Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer
Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?lang=en) Software Freedom
Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) Open OSS
(https://openoss.sourceforge.net/) Adam Monsen LinkedIn
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/amonsen) Adam Monsen Website
(https://adammonsen.com/) Steadfast Self-Hosting: Rapid-Rise
Personal Cloud (https://selfhostbook.com/) SeaGL
(http://seagl.org/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 75: Deb Nicholson on
the OSI, the future of open source, and SeaGL
(https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/debofthenorth) Nextcloud
(https://nextcloud.com/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer
(https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree
Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest:
Adam Monsen.