Jerod Santo: It’s time to make computing personal again

Benj Edwards deftly describes how “surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe” by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past:

• What percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC?
• Which part of this TV set kept track of everything you watched and then secretly sold the data to advertisers?
• Which part of Windows 95 fed you ads without your consent and kept track of everything you did remotely so Microsoft could keep stats on it?
• Which part of Amazon.com in 2000 tried to get you to buy millions of no-name counterfeit and dangerous goods propped up by stealth advertising and fake reviews?
• Which part of Google in the 1990s and early 2000s blanketed its results with deceptive ads or made you add “Reddit” to every search to get good results that weren’t overwhelmed by SEO-seeking filler content?

When you say it like that… he continues:

Every generation looks back and says, “Things used to be better,” whether they are accurate or not.

But I’m not suggesting we live in the past. It is possible to learn from history and integrate the best of today’s technology with fair business practices that are more sustainable and healthy for everyone in the long run.

Benj has a few ideas on what we can do individually to push this ideal forward, but he believes it will take collective action to make meaningful changes:

Whether through purposeful reform or the eventual collapse of digital strip mining, I believe the personal computer will eventually rise again—–along with our chance to reclaim control of our digital lives.

Scott Hanselman: …where you have the base thing that everyone can use, and you provide it as a service, and then you have some special herbs and spices that are custom, and then you pay for those plugins. So for example, if you want to do the C# DevKit and do sophisticated debugging on Visual Studio Code, you would then sign in with your Visual Studio subscription. But then for the longest time, GitHub Copilot’s extension was not open source, which means we couldn’t build on top of it. So if I had a cooler AI thing and I wanted to use their APIs, I couldn’t.

Nathan Sobo: Yeah. I mean, the main message is I’m not here to shake down developers for a subscription on AI. I’m here to make it convenient for them to access, give them a lot of control… And in order to be convenient, we’ve got to charge for it, because it just can’t be an infinite compute budget.

Drew Wilson: Yeah. Clerk.com/billing is where you’ll go for that page… And what’s really cool about Clerk is that it makes authentication super-easy. Kind of like Stripe did 15 years ago, or whenever they started. They made this pitch that “We want to own the credit card data at your company, and you’re no longer going to have ownership ownership of it. We’re going to own it, but we’re going to build some really cool software around it to make it really easy to use, and build in a bunch of fraud and safety and monitoring protections for you.” And they actually won that argument. People stopped using whatever they were using to reconcile credit cards on their own, and they gave all that data to Stripe. And Stripe built some really cool APIs and stuff around it to make it really easy, and actually easier to access than if you’d done it on your own.

And so Clerk’s doing the same thing with the user table… Which is for a lot of engineers a harder thing, but as we scale engineering into, and as it goes downstream into less and less technical folks, with AI now happening, they don’t really care. They are happy to give up their user table to Clerk, to say “You handle the user record, because you’re going to build this amazing software around it, these cool APIs, these cool UIs… You’re just going to make it where I don’t even have to think about this stuff.”

So Clerk’s done a really good job to date on that argument, and winning folks over, and showing how much better it can be to build your app on Clerk that not build your app on Clerk. The next major step to that user, from a company perspective, is like “I want to make money off this user.” And so that’s where this new product billing comes in. So it’s really the second product that Clerk will have ever offered off, and now they have billing.

[01:21:59.11] So everything that we’re building at Clerk in terms of billing is all native to Clerk. So we’re not actually using Stripe’s billing product. We’re just using Stripe for payments, and eventually PayPal for payments. And you’ll be able to pick between them. For right now though, all of the recurring billing logic, all of the invoices, the payment attempts, the emails, all that stuff is native and built into Clerk. And what that means is we can tailor these plans that you create, these subscription plans you’re going to create to SaaS, and we don’t have to account for every other type of business like Stripe has to. So we can get very narrow-focused to make the UI and the UX way better.

Then separately, there’s this idea of entitlements. Okay, someone signed up for a bronze plan, and this is a person who signed up for a gold plan. Well, what do they have access to? Well, usually, if you’re using Stripe or some other system, you’ve got to then build out these entitlements in your app internally, and you have to somehow reconcile them and keep them in sync with the plans that they’re signing up with. And you have all these if statements all over your code saying “If bronze plan, and it has this feature, and if that entitlement, do this, that, and the other thing. But if this…” etc. So it gets crazy. And so at Clerk, what we’re doing is we’re merging those all into one thing. So when someone signs up, or when you’re creating your plan, you can assign features to it and entitlements, and you can set the parameters on those, and you can have them be the same on gold, and on platinum, by just adding the features to both of them. Or you can slightly tweak that feature to have this number of credits, versus that one has this number of credits… You could do all that right from the UI inside of Clerk. And then in your codebase, you just use our has function [unintelligible 01:23:45.20] the name of the feature. And then it will automatically check to see who are they logged in as, and if you’re in an organization situation - because clerk also supports orgs - where you have roles, this has function will automatically look at the role this user is logged in as. Are they logged in as an admin, or a member? And maybe admins have the thousand credits and members only have the 50. And it will just automatically figure that out for you.

So then the entitlement scenario on actually building out your app becomes way easier than it ever would anywhere else. And I mean that sincerely, because that is the truth. So it ends up becoming just a way better experience as an engineer, and you can get to making money so much faster.

Justin Searls: Yeah. So what I had was I’ve got a blog, justin.searls.co, and it’s just a traditional-looking blog, with a lot of like link posts, and other stuff. I’ve added a whole bunch of kinds of multimedia, especially since starting a podcast. And what I want to do is every time I post something to the blog, I would want it to go on what had been called Twitter, and then there’s Twitter and Mastodon that people are on, and then there’s Twitter and Mastodon and Threads that people are on, and now people actually use BlueSky for something other posting now, so’ve I got to get on BlueSky. And to manually copy-paste the same message or to use a tool like Buffer and like manually click the thing and try to make sure that it looks right would have been so time-consuming. Additionally, now I’ve got four timelines that can each separately derail my train of thought and get in the way of my workflow, or whatever, and I’m going to be way less productive. And there’s a reason why I always had to keep Twitter at arm’s length, because I got addicted to the timeline scroll.

So I built a kind of hodgepodge of Docker containers, this random – somebody has this thing called Feedtoot, but that’s in Python, and I don’t know that, so I’m running in a Docker container and a Synology… So then I made a thing called like Feed to Gram, and Feed to Thread, that would do similar things, and those are just Ruby gems that you can use today. And if you’ve got an Atom feed, it’ll read the feed, and then it’ll syndicate on your behalf if you give it the right API tokens and you jump through the 800 steps that Facebook demands.

[01:43:59.02] The problem with that – it scaled to one really well, but then my wife saw me and the life of luxury of a write-only existence, where I was able to publish all I wanted and be in all these places without having to get sucked into them, she wanted the same thing. And so then now I’ve got doubles of all of these Docker containers running in my Synology. But then unlike me, she can’t log into that and then understand what’s happening in the logs when she’s got like the wrong aspect ratio or whatever in Instagram… And so I built her this platform, this Rails application for her business. Betterwithbecky.com. It’s like a strength training subscription app, but it also has this whole thing called Beckygram in front of it, which is sort of like a blog for people who are Instagram-first. And it looks a lot like Instagram, and it can do video, and it can do photo carousels, and all that stuff.

Well, to get the Beckygrams into Instagram, I had to actually make it part of a real working application. So I had this Rails application now, and it’s got like all of the background jobs and all of the sort of like durability that a real user would need in terms of like error handling, and making sure that they have a way to retry and fix things and remediate if there’s a problem in publishing, and then like a link back to the post, or whatever it is.

And now I’d gone through all that work, and I’m starting to get – I’m finally done with Becky’s app, I’m starting to get people who are like right into my website, or the podcast, and be like “Man, how do you do all that stuff again? I really want to be able to do that, too. Would you release like a Hugo template?” But that would just create more problems for me, because then I would be supporting a copy-pasted project file… That’s not the solution. So what I decided to do is I’m going to build a dead simple, this does one thing, and it solves exactly my problem, and if it solves your problem too, you’re welcome to subscribe to it… A little app that I call Posse Party, so you can run with my Posse.

It will basically be a place where you sign up, you give it a feed URL, probably Atom, RSS, JSON feed when I’m all said and done… And then you add your social accounts. Now, it’s working for me in production, for me, and I’ve got the big four Twitter-like things; I probably do Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook… And all it does is read the Atom feed and a little bit like a JSON sidecar payload that is also posted on my blog as part of the feed. And that little sidecar payload says “For each of these posts, this is how I want to present this, this is the format string I want to use”, and any customizations on a per-platform basis. Like maybe for BlueSky I want it to look this way, and for Twitter I want it to look this way.

And then it’ll of course be platform-dependent. So there’s certain things - on Instagram, it’s going to look a little bit different. And BlueSky’s got different rules about embeds, and all that. So all the app really does is read a feed, turn it into these normal database rows, and then a job runs that will syndicate those to all of the different services by reading the configuration that you supply, as well whatever defaults you configure in the app. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And if that has value to you… Jerod and I, before the show, were talking about our information diets these days, and we’ve both reverted to RSS… But I’m not going to get my mom to use RSS, or most of my friends in my life. They’re in one or two of the social apps, and they’re casual at this point, looking at it… I just want them to be able to click my face and see my stuff. Even if the downranks me for posting via the API, even if the links get the fact that you’re linking outside to a third party, the platform doesn’t like it, as long as my stuff is literally there, I’m a lot happier, because then I don’t have to tell everyone about everything in my life.

And since getting started with the Posse Party stuff, I’ve noticed that more and more people in my life – like, I had a guy detailing my car a couple of weeks ago, and he’s like “Oh man, I really loved that clip that you did about whether or not to have children and your decision-making process.” I’m like “How’d you see that?” and he’s like “Oh, I saw it on X.” I was like “Great.” I haven’t logged into X in like three years.

[01:48:04.23] So I don’t know, that’s the theory. Now, I don’t know what the market is. I kind of don’t care, because as long as I want this, I’m happy to build it… But if it can help people, encourage people be the thing that gets people to sign up, and make their own website, and own their own content, or buy their own domain and like centralize themselves as kind of the king of their castle, and only treat these platforms at arm’s length, as those are just “newspaper stands to throw my stuff on” - there’s always the canonical URL - then that just supports the open web, and it really promotes people as thinking of themselves, less as just like me, like a take maker or just operating in the Twitter stew, and instead being somebody who’s developing a voice and curating an audience. And if I can help people along that trajectory, it seems like it’d be putting some good in the world.

Adam Stacoviak: You know, it’s really hard to compete with icons out there. There’s so many of them out there, Free, not free, paid, not paid, subscription, not subscription… Unless you’re in it to win it, it’s kind of hard to compete, you know?

Jerod Santo: And so it’s really good. And then of course, you can deep-dive if you want to. But I actually was a subscriber of Blinkist… It’s like a 15 bucks a month kind of a thing; like an Audible replacement. And they do a really good job with it. I appreciate their product. But I kind of got to the end of Blinkist as a subscriber, and I was like “Let’s do all the top 50 business books that everybody says I should read.” Atomic Habits, “How to win friends and influence people”, and just all that stuff. And I got to the end and I was like “Oh, I ran out of Blinkist”, so I just canceled the subscription. I’m sure there’s more things now, as people continue to write, but… That’s a pretty cool service, really.

Ashley Jeffs: Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, at that level as well, it feels like begging. It feels like begging for sponsors, except this time you also get access to this web app I made. And to me it just didn’t feel like enough. Like, it didn’t feel like I was doing enough. I wanted to have like these serious contracts, where I can see these companies that are really invested in what I’ve built, so that I feel safe. Whereas if I have like 1,000 people on a $5 a month subscription - that’s great, but that’s not what I would have had. I would have had years and years of slowly growing the subscriber base.

[00:36:07.12] And it was potential. Like, I had enough income that I was – I existed. And that was a success in my books, because I had the lifestyle that I wanted. But the problem is then I had kids. So then I’ve got to justify “Daddy. Father. Why don’t you work at Google?” And I’ve got to explain “Well…” [laughter]

Adam Stacoviak: Oh, yeah. This is the coolest stuff ever. This guy used to work at NASA, and he is all in STEM, and all kids-focused, but he has his subscription box that you can get to like build different stuff. And as you’re describing this - how do I pronounce this? Chibitronics… I’m thinking like “Wow, here’s more kits that entertain and educate these –”

Helena Zhang: Yeah. I think feature-wise, a lot of these platforms offer a lot; they often offer both one-time donations and a subscription model… And I think different tools just have different – they’ve developed different audiences or ways they’re used. Patreon – I don’t know, maybe I need to stream some more content, if it’s to get more Patreon subscribers. I think the mental model, even in the names of these products… If it’s called Buy Me a Coffee, you’re more in that one-time “Yeah, throw five dollars over” mindset.

So for at least the projects we’ve worked on, that seems to be the one that people gravitate towards, and less so – I think we might have had one or two Patreon subscribers over time. Correct me if I’m wrong, Tobie, but…

Justin Garrison: Yeah. Because I know other Mastodon servers that don’t have those features, and they don’t even do relays. It’s like a super-lightweight – like, I can run this for myself. I don’t do – a lot of the things that are really heavy about a Mastodon server, I don’t do it. And it’s fine, and you don’t have to do those things, but the actual subscription, “Let’s make sure that this works across services” is mainly just for the upstream Mastodon server, official – I don’t know if it’s… I guess it’s official. It’s the one at Mastodon.social.

Carl George: What I realized around that angst is that we made all those changes and some of it predates me, some of it was right around when I was getting hired… But what I learned about the CentOS community was they’re basically two different personas, and it kind of splits evenly in the lifecycle. There were the people using CentOS in the first five years of the lifecycle. New version will come out, they’ll say “Yes, I want these new features, I want these new capabilities, and I’m also frustrated.” Those happened to be the same people that were frustrated that they couldn’t contribute to it and make changes to it. Then there were people kind of using it in the last five years, instead of using RHEL. For them, it was just the free, unbranded RHEL, they were never going to contribute, they don’t care about being able to contribute. They just want to get the product for free, and they want it to be maintained for as long as possible.

So those two personas were kind of where we unintentionally divided the community. People that liked what we were doing with CentOS Stream, being able to contribute, and it still has a five and a half year lifecycle, which - I mean, that’s the same thing Ubuntu LTS gives you without the pro subscription. Five years. So it’s still a pretty long time. It’s still an LTS. Those people, they’re like “Yeah, I like these changes. This makes a lot of sense to me.” And the people that do not care about contributing, do not care about getting their bugs answered, they just want to get the product for free, they’re like “Oh no, I’m going to go to these other guys that give me the same thing.” The big change is because it got actually harder on CentOS and Red Hat once the acquihire thing happened, and they were paying the CentOS maintainers, because customers would come in and say “Well, you’re making both of these things, so why should I pay you for one and not the other? Or why should I pay you for the one when this other one’s free?” And that conflation of having Red Hat sponsorship, it helped the project not fail and collapse, but it also made it harder to have those conversations, to draw that line between the product and the project.

So now the new rebuilds - I heard one guy inside Red Hat described it as “These changes are Red Hat getting out of the rebuild business.” Like, we decided that’s not where we want to spend our time. Here’s the way that building an operating system works in our pipeline holistically, to make a better product. And it’s still really close to RHEL, and you can still use it for whatever you want to, but it’s not going to be trying to match RHEL identically anymore. It’s getting six months ahead of RHEL on features and fixes.

But like you said, a lot of those people that are going to different alternatives now, they’re in that latter group, the five plus year usage, where they just want the same thing. They don’t want anything to change ever, and they don’t want to think about being able to contribute being a benefit.

David Heinemeier Hansson: They’re still trying. And I think actually, even though the tragedy is that Heroku was left to rot… Right? It was bought by Salesforce, and they’ve left it to rot. I’m not saying there’s no one there. I’m not saying the people who are still there are nice, kind, caring, professional engineers. All that’s true. But you look at what happened between Heroku getting launched in 2007, and until they were bought - it was basically the world. They turned everything upside down. Then you look at what happened since Salesforce bought them, and now nothing’s happened. So that’s just a little sad, but whatever. This is what happens in the world of commerce. Things get bought, and they get stuffed inside some big bureaucracy… And I think it is our job, or I consider it to be my job as an open source software developer to go “Alright, all this great philosophy and even technology existed in this commercial project. Now that commercial project has been left to rot. Let’s make sure we rescue some of those ideas.” We’re not going to go back to whatever the norm was before Heroku. Developers don’t want to go back. They want to have like one command, deploy. With Heroku it was git push. With Kamal, it’s kamal deploy. Okay, that’s where we want to be. So let’s bring those things out.

[00:44:09.14] And I think Rails 8 has really done it in a way I’m just incredibly proud of… Because the speed with which I’m able to start a new application, develop something basic, use some of the other new Rails 8 features like generating some authentication, and then taking that to production. Like full on, ready to go, ready to serve internet traffic. I have everything exposed here as a real IP to the internet. That path has never been shorter. And not only has it never been shorter, the fact that it no longer leans on some commercial subscription that you need - that just warms my heart.

I love commercial interest in all of these things. I think it’s great that we have commercial companies who want to improve developer experiences etc. But my heart really is with open source, and I want the default to be able to be open source end to end. You should be able to start a new application, do all the development, deploy to production, run it in production, operate it at large scale, on an entirely open source stack. And then the commercial part is optional.

Adam Stacoviak: [01:32:01.06] Well, even - like, to zoom out a little bit, there was parts of the conversation where I almost interjected, about this capitalistic push of the subscription model. This idea that the way they can fund this innovation - which I get; the innovation needs to be there, Intel and others… But they can only do that innovation if they can sustain themselves through some version of subscription. But then you peel back the layer that it seems like the draw to the end, not the means, is this idea of creating enough capital to push the thing forward. And then they’re just in this cycle, like you had just said, this is example of creating a new data center. This is how we’ve done it. This is how we do it. And so you almost kind of get this angst against capitalism as the driver of it.

And I think you’re the kind of person who aligns the capitalistic thoughts and innovation with the human necessary needs, not just to make a successful product or project or a thing or an acquisition, but something that levels up humanity. And I just think that’s an interesting thought experiment, is “How can we align capitalism with humanism, so that we are still here? And not just to spend our money, but also to enjoy the lives we’ve been given.”

Adam Stacoviak: Well, I think there’s room for one, because I speculated with Lady Bird that there could be some sort of subscription model to sustain it. There’s definitely room for the browser caring more about security and privacy. And the incumbents, Chrome – Google has had a bad reputation for user privacy. Apple has been on the fence of privacy-focused, but then they also have lots of things that are behind the scenes that get spoken about their practices that may be somewhat true or mostly true… And I still trust Apple. I’m not distrusting Apple.

[00:42:09.01] What I’m trying to say is I think there’s room for a browser to do stuff like this as a business model, that isn’t just “Here’s a Firefox clone, or Chrome clone, or a Safari clone, and we’re a new company, sustain us”, where they can deliver more innovation. And I think insofar as they’ve done with the browsing experience, which is the jarring part that I’ve said that’s hard for me to cross that chasm, there’s room for features, in my opinion.

Steven Pyle: Oh, it’s rough out there, man, I’m telling you… So yeah, same as Kent, I still use Copilot daily for my job, doing prompts to generate some code, some really rough draft stuff that I then work with… But that’s pretty much it. I’ve canceled my ChatGPT Plus subscription, because I’m not getting anything useful out of it anymore. Not that I could get from some other source…

Adam Stacoviak: That’s where I’m at. Because he mentions Nextcloud in one of his services… I don’t want to be – I mean maybe I do at some point, but at least right now… I don’t want to be responsible for calendars being up, photos being up, file services being up… I mean it just seems like “Oof…” But maybe Nextcloud makes it easy. I just feel like, in the moment, without having tried it, it feels like a lot. And I speak to that because of the rented subscription. The easiest place you spend money is like Dropbox. Calendar I guess comes with our Google Suite for our business… And in other cases you’re getting it for –

Erez Zukerman: It’s a good question. It’s not something I think about, and it’s not something I optimize for. For me, what I care about in kind of an ideal scenario is you buy the one keyboard once, and you are done. Keyboard people call that end game. You got your keyboard, it’s working, and this is it. And for many people, we do hit that, and we provide support in firmware for a long, long time, and our warranty is fairly generous as well… So there are many people who buy the one keyboard, and they’re done. But those people then often do two things. One is they subscribe to our newsletter. I’m sorry, I’m being very immodest here… We have a very good newsletter. It’s called The Ergo. It’s not about only keyboards. It’s once a month, and we put a lot into it. And those people subscribe, and they stay engaged. I get fan mail for the newsletter every month. I get people writing back and saying “Oh, I loved this issue. I use this.” We recommend tools from across the web, we recommend resources, whatever… So they remain engaged.

And then the other thing they do is - yes, they talk about us. We pretty much rely on that, because we don’t work with influencers. We don’t advertise at all. We don’t work with a PR firm. Like, you guys came to me, and I’m very happy to be here, but it’s not like somebody reached out to you and like “Oh, can you –” It’s just all organic.

And what I’ve found is that there is a ton of goodwill. When people sense that you’re being real, that you’re not trying to scale, that you’re not thinking of your software as a service move, and how can I charge a subscription fee for this keyboard or for this thing… When you’re just simply making a good thing, and trying to keep doing just that, it really resonates. And we have people who really like ZSA, and who like our keyboards, and they do share with friends, family, coworkers.

[46:17] And it also helps that the keyboard is so weird-looking. You have it on your desk in an office, if you work in an office… People do routinely stop and say “What is that?” And then our customers really talk. They really do open up. They’re not like “Ah, it’s a keyboard.” No, because it’s kind of more than that, for them, for customers who get it. So yeah, that’s kind of how it works.

Adam Stacoviak: I mean, I would be buying them if I didn’t have a subscription.