FLOSS 753 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Siles, and this week Dan Lynch and I talk with Arnold Balkan about small technology. He has a small technology foundation. He has a server called Kitten. He's working on everything you can do with open source that is part of community that is in the commons that we can all use. That's actually easy to use. It doesn't have to be geeky. Kind of going back to what we love best about Web 1.0, but not just for techies. For Muggles as well. And he's got an enormously good design sense. He's really on top of doing all the right things in the world. He's a great guest and that is coming up next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Tweet. This is Floss Weekly, episode 753, recorded Wednesday, October 11th, 2023. Small is beautiful. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Collide. That's Collide with a k. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collide.com/floss to book an on demand demo today.

Leo Laporte (00:01:27):
Listeners of this program get an ad-free version if their members of Club twit, $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the TWIT plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.

Doc Searls (00:01:54):
Hello again, everyone everywhere. This is Floss Weekly. I am Doc Siles and I'm in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, downtown Silicon Valley, and in a very, very, very large reverberate room that says recording in progress on the doors outside. So hopefully we won't be interrupted. And joining me this morning as co-host is Dan Lynch in Liverpool uk. There he is with a completely red theme.

Dan Lynch (00:02:26):
I'm just showing off that I've got my Liverpool football Club shirt on.

Doc Searls (00:02:29):
Oh, that's good. Is that a bird? What is their symbol there?

Dan Lynch (00:02:33):
It's the live bird. It's the symbol of Liverpool.

Doc Searls (00:02:35):
Oh, it is? Okay.

Dan Lynch (00:02:37):
I won't bore you with the story. There's a long myth about how in Liverpool there's a thing called the live building, which has two of these birds, which are statues. One looks out to sea and one looks into the city. And the story is that the one looking out to sea is looking out for the sailors and the seamen who are out at sea, protecting them, making sure they're okay. And the other one looks at the city to make sure the city's okay.

Doc Searls (00:02:58):
It's working So far, is it not just about? Just about. So our guest this morning is Earl Balkan. We're off to a late start, so I'm just going to go ahead and introduce him. Earl's an old friend, a big friend of Open Source and all things good and small it turns out because that's sort of a theme for him. And Errol, you're actually in Dublin. Are you Dublin or just somewhere in Ireland?

Aral Balkan (00:03:30):
Hey Doc, it's somewhere in Ireland, also known as Kill Kenny. It's a lovely little city, kind of about an hour and a half south of Dublin.

Doc Searls (00:03:41):
So I've seen you now, I think on two continents, but not recently. I think I last saw you in London, yet another failed startup, but gala in the, what was it? I think it was at City Hall. It was a pretty fancy

Aral Balkan (00:03:58):
Building. Yeah, I don't entirely, was it the Royal Society of Arts? I know we met there once at an event

Doc Searls (00:04:06):
There. Oh yes, yes we did. And that's when you got me to do the, I became a fellow of whatever that was.

Aral Balkan (00:04:13):
Oh, so that happened. Good, good. Glad we were able to make that happen. I resigned. I actually resigned from the Royal Society of Arts because they went to bit too Silicon Valley for me, and

Doc Searls (00:04:24):
That was

Aral Balkan (00:04:24):
After my time. I was disappointed. Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:04:27):
I was there. I'm

Aral Balkan (00:04:27):
Glad you got in.

Doc Searls (00:04:29):
Yeah, I got in and then it cost money. So I got out and we weren't going to the UK as often, but they had a nice facility. They had a great facility.

Aral Balkan (00:04:37):
I like that. Yeah, lovely library as well. They have a little library and so much potential really. But yeah, I was quite disappointed with their lack of vision in terms of alternative approaches to technology, but I guess that's not their main thing. So to be

Doc Searls (00:04:55):
Excited. Yeah, yeah. But you're from North America somewhere. Am I wrong about that?

Aral Balkan (00:05:04):
How long have we known each other doc? No, it's the accent. I know. It's the accent. So no, I have an American accent, but my parents are Turkish. I grew up in Malaysia. Oh wow. That's right.

Doc Searls (00:05:17):
Yeah.

Aral Balkan (00:05:17):
Yep. And I have French citizenship and now I live in Ireland. So I like to say Earth. I kind of feel like I'm from Earth and from, I mean, do we need anything more really? But yeah, so take your pick.

Doc Searls (00:05:36):
That's great. Wow. Wow. So I recall, I think when you first met, you were very long on design and one of the few people in the open source world who is design oriented. And for those of you who are listening, which is most of you, Errol's background there includes his one wheeler and great lighting. Where's the one wheel? He's very well, that's not why I have a broken hand. He has a broken hand, which is a little, I

Aral Balkan (00:06:04):
Tripped over my own feet playing tennis last week in Spain. So that's about as good as that story gets.

Doc Searls (00:06:10):
Yeah, it is a little disgrace note on otherwise. Perfect, perfect food there. Yes.

Aral Balkan (00:06:16):
Sorry. And now I have my mom calling. Let me just silence that. Sorry. Because everything happens at once. We're also buying our first home now and stuff, so people are calling with regards to that. So lemme just silence that phone. Sorry. Yes, doc, you were saying,

Doc Searls (00:06:34):
So why Ireland? Obviously you could live anywhere apparently, including France, which is not a bad place to hang

Aral Balkan (00:06:41):
Out. Well, not everywhere. I mean, I wish the world worked that way. I'm lucky enough now to have French citizenship and so I can live in the eu. Before that, it was only Turkish citizenship. I actually gave that up because I insulted the president of Turkey in a public forum in Germany on purpose. And he doesn't like insult. He's quite an autocrat. So yeah, I can't go back to Turkey now, but that's a different story. I'm happy to tell you if you want to hear it, but why Ireland? So we left, we were living in the UK and we were working on small technology on the precursors to just small web, but basically working on human rights in technology. And the conservative government at the time, the Tories got back into power with an agenda towards scrapping the human rights Act, a potential referendum on Brexit.

(00:07:46):
And also this new bill called the Investigatory Powers Bill, which would've meant that they could compel any communications platform to backdoor themselves and for them to implement mass surveillance, seeing these things on the horizon. None of these had happened really, and only one of them hasn't actually passed now. They haven't been able to destroy the Human rights Act yet. They're trying. We were like, ah, let's not be in a place where we have to fight the government and try to build technology that protects human rights, et cetera. It's a lot of work to do just one of those things. So we decided to leave and then of course Brexit happened and this and that. So we were like, okay, we dodged a bullet there. We went to Sweden. First of all, you hear about Scandinavian countries, how they're perfect and everything. And I mean, to be fair, they are better than most.

(00:08:44):
As a foreigner, it was hard for us to integrate. You have to really truly integrate a hundred percent. You have to really become Swedish with everything that you are in order to be kind of accepted a bit there. But I mean, great thing about Scandinavian countries, they take care of their own, which you can't say for a lot of other countries at least they do that. It's a low bar, but they meet that. So then Laura, my partner, she's British, she wanted to be closer to home. I wanted to remain within the eu. And so we wanted a place where English was spoken and Ireland kind of checks all those boxes. So that's why Ireland, it was pragmatic really.

Dan Lynch (00:09:24):
It's a beautiful place though. Incredible place to live. I dunno Kilkenny as well, but I do know, I know everyone knows Dublin. That's like the most reductive thing to say, but everyone knows also Belfast as well, which is technically Northern Ireland. But I've been to Belfast quite a lot.

Aral Balkan (00:09:40):
Yeah, I'd love to see it. I haven't been to Belfast, but Dublin. Yeah, definitely. And of course Dublin is kind of the mecca of mainstream technology, kind of the Silicon Valley equivalent I guess in Ireland. That's where all the Facebooks and the Googles, et cetera are. That's not why we are here, but just so happens to be the case. It's not by accident either. Of course it they're based in Ireland because Ireland is a very small country. It's not a very strong country. And so they want to be regulated by a weak country and that's why they're here. And that's why we don't get a lot of regulation being executed like gdp also

Dan Lynch (00:10:22):
Tax, I think. I don't want to

Aral Balkan (00:10:24):
Exactly. Same thing.

Dan Lynch (00:10:26):
It's the same thing. Yeah. So that's why, anyway, let's not veer into that.

Aral Balkan (00:10:30):
Hey, I thought this was a show on free and open source. How do you make that nonpolitical?

Dan Lynch (00:10:36):
That's true. That is true. So Rol, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned there about some of the things that upset you about living in the UK or potentially things that were coming down the pipeline. And it's all struck to me as I'm a member of the open rights group, and I wondered if you've been involved with Yes. I'm guessing you.

Aral Balkan (00:10:52):
Yeah, I'm aware of the open rights group and I'm seeing a lot of good things coming out of them at the moment as I'm looking from the outside. I think we had our differences back then. I don't even remember entirely what it was. I think it might've been a free versus open sort of thing. I don't know. There was a time when I was seeing a lot of open being used to justify kind of, I guess open being used in the sense of open for business as in how can we privatize things so that businesses can then enclose them. And that's an interpretation of Open that I'm not a fan of because that interpretation does exist, of course, where it's about enterprise and it's about how open data being open, not for the sense of keeping it open, but enabling corporations to then enclose it with APIs, et cetera, that are proprietary.

(00:11:47):
So open is a problematic word for me, and I guess free is in a lot of ways as well. But yeah, I mean I'm seeing lots of good stuff coming out of them right now. I've been kind of boosting some of their posts on Mastodon. So I don't know if anything, I'm assuming organizations evolve, et cetera as well. And we're not where we were 10 years ago, 10 years ago when I was talking about this stuff, people were like, oh, tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. Why are you being so critical of Google and Facebook and all of these lovely companies? They just want to help us. They're giving us free stuff. And I was like, look, you don't need conspiracy theories. What's their business model? Follow the money. How are they making money? It's quite toxic if you think about it. So yeah, I think things have come along. I don't have to make those same arguments today as often,

Dan Lynch (00:12:38):
So you're kind of leading us into it there as well. But I've been doing some reading on your website, which I have to say is beautifully designed as well. Doc mentioned how,

Aral Balkan (00:12:45):
Thank you so much,

Dan Lynch (00:12:46):
How good your background looks and all that kind of stuff. But your website looks great and I thought it looked really good. You've got you and Laura on the top there on the head of the bar and stuff. It looks great. But anyway, what we're kind of leading into is the reason why we're here is, so tell us about what you're doing with Web Zero. Tell us what Web Zero is in your opinion.

Aral Balkan (00:13:04):
I mean, web Zero was just sort of a reaction to the whole web three that we have. Can I say, is that considered profanity? I'm not supposed to use profanity. Okay, so we'll just say BSS and it'll make it right. So yeah, the web three stuff, the blockchain and NFTs and all of these Ponzi schemes, et cetera, which in a lot of ways is just the next generation of Silicon Valley, right? I mean it started with the web initially. Web 1.0 was just at the very beginning. There wasn't even necessarily a business model, but you had to really go, once they discovered the business model, you still had to visit the sites in order for them to capture the data, which it was all about data. It's always been about data. And then Web 2.0 came along O'Reilly Web 2.0 and APIs, open APIs were supposed to save the world.

(00:13:59):
And that just meant that we made use of lots of developers everywhere to embed our tracking into their websites and into the applications they were building so that people didn't have to go directly to a Google, et cetera. It could be embedded in somebody's site and they get to track 'em. And then in a lot of ways, web three was just kind of like a natural evolution of that. It's like, okay, we've done those things. What now? Well, oh, how about blockchain? Now let's go back and decentralize things and let's do blockchain and NFTs. And of course these are all Ponzi schemes as they I think, I don't think I need to make the case for that either these days.

(00:14:45):
So it was a reaction to that. It's like, okay, let's decentralize. I completely agree with you, let's decentralize because having all this power and control in the hands of a handful of trillion dollar corporations is not good for democracy. But blockchain isn't decentralization. What are you decentralizing there? It's definitely not topologically decentralized, having every transaction, a single database that then you can replicate a billion times maybe and prove that it's the same database. Isn't decentralization in my book. It's not topological decentralization. If you have a billion people having a billion databases would be decentralized in the way that I see it, or 2 billion databases or 3 billion databases in the control and ownership of these people. So yeah, web Zero was just basically a reaction to that. And yeah, you take the BSS out of Web three and you get left with Web Zero, which is just about decentralization.

(00:15:43):
And of course the problem with it is nobody becomes a billionaire with Web Zero, and that's a big problem for some people. For me, that's a feature, not a bug. And I don't really use the term Web Zero. That was almost a campaign really just to say, think about this. I think about what we're building as the small web, and basically that's just the exact opposite of the big web. So what if we had a web where each one of us had our own place at our own address on this web, and we could be public if we wanted to be, and people could follow us just like they can on Mastodon or Facebook or whatever not. But we could also be private. And when we mean private, we mean actually private, not Facebook private, not you, me and Zuckerberg private, but just you and me private. So end-to-end encrypted, what if we could talk to each other? So the small web really is a peer to peer-to-peer web. That's what I'm working on building.

Dan Lynch (00:16:45):
That's excellent. I mean, I was reading a bit about it today and you've got some interesting tools that we'll get into as we go through Kitten and all the, well, it seems to me a little bit like did you ever get involved with the Freedom Box Freedom Box project or have you heard of that?

Aral Balkan (00:17:02):
Yeah, I'm familiar with it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, ideologically in the same vein. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, the initial implementation that I'm working on is based on people going to a website saying, Hey, I want this domain and here's some means of payment, which doesn't have to be monetary, but some way of actually being able to say, you can have those resources and press a button and boom, you have your own place on the web. We have to really make it that simple. If it's going to work, we have to make getting your own place on the small web as simple as signing up for a Facebook account. If it requires any more technical knowledge than that to set up or maintain, we've lost the ideology. Doesn't matter. I mean, of course we know the ideology matters, but the ideology behind it doesn't matter if it's not usable, if it's not something that people can just get up and running, then they're not going to use it.

(00:18:06):
That's where the whole design background really comes into it as well, because we sometimes have a lot of arrogance in the free and open source world, and I think that's really toxic as well, where I've actually seen people state that if people are not willing to put in the time and effort to learn the tools that we built and usually the unusable tools that we've built that work for us, but maybe not for anyone else, that they don't deserve what we're building for them, kind of like we're creating this ideologically pure thing, but if you won't take the time to learn our idiosyncrasies of how it works, then you don't deserve our tools. And that's so arrogant. I think underlying this is this aspect of we still have the concept of users, and we don't use that term in the small web in a small tech.

(00:18:57):
We talk about people because it's a very small step from user, which is an othering in my book to dumb user. And I think we still harbor this notion of these are stupid people. We're very smart people. We build very smart things because we're smart people and these dumb people can't figure it out. It's not that the reason we have to build our free and open source alternatives have to be beautiful experiences have to be usable, have to be functional, but even maybe beautiful experiences is not because people are dumb, it's because they're brain surgeons and they have brain surgery in the morning, so they don't have time to figure out what you've cobbled together in your interface, how that works because you haven't actually given it the amount of time that it might require for you to build something that's easy to use. And I think we really need to change our thinking.

(00:19:49):
I've seen it's happening, it's definitely happening. It's been happening way more. Again, I have to much less make this point these days, but I think there is still that element in the free and open source world sometimes where it's like, Hey, look, we're the good guys. We're building great stuff, so it works for me. And if you can't figure it out, then you need to put in the time. Now we're creating, those are rites of passages and we need to really get past that as a culture. We need to get past building these rites of passages for ourselves in the tools that we make and for the people everyday, people who use technologies as an everyday thing. Because unless we can create alternatives for everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing, we don't win any of this. And what's at stake isn't toys, technological toys? What's at stake is human rights is democracy.

Doc Searls (00:20:42):
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Dan Lynch (00:22:15):
So Rol, we were talking about, you were telling us all about the Web zero stuff. I keep saying Web Zero. I know it's just a term fine. I read the manifesto a little bit today. You did a Web Zero manifesto. Very nice. I liked it. So tell us a bit about the technologies that you're building to kind of enable this small web that you're talking about. I see things like you've got a web server or a web platform called Kitten. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Aral Balkan (00:22:39):
Yeah, sure. So where it's at right now is I'm building tools to enable developers to build small web apps and sites, including myself. So we're going to build a social network of sorts. I guess it's not a social network if it's peer to peer in a sense, but I want other people to be able to build small web and peer-to-peer web applications, and I want us to share every brick of what we're building so that people can build at different levels of it. So Kitten is a server and a framework for building small websites, and it's progressively enhanced in the sense that you could actually give it an H T M L file, just the bog standard H T M L file like you would've in 1993 run kitten and it will serve that. And I think that's key. I think that's really important for anything that is on the web today. Everything else is a progressive enhancement. From there, it does a lot, I mean, all the way to having public key authentication baked into it so that developers don't have to build that because kind of a cornerstone of peer-to-peer if you're going to have end-to-end encrypted communications, for example.

(00:23:54):
But it starts covers the basics and basically as a developer, you have a one line installation command that you can run. If you trust me that I'm not going to invade your computer with my malware if you don't just clone the repository and run the install command. Again, it's for developers right now. This tool is for developers, but it uses node jss as a runtime. And so you can of course make use of any node module, et cetera. And the development process with it is there is no build process. You're running the server, you use H T M L, CSS and JavaScript as a base to build your applications, and then you can enhance them with H T M L over the wire using H T M X, which is a very, it's a lovely small, tiny JavaScript framework that it has first class support for and it also has first class support for Alpine jss, all very small kind of micro libraries, micro frameworks that you can use.

(00:25:00):
So the exact opposite again, of big frameworks. This isn't selt kit or it isn't React and you don't have these huge build processes, et cetera. To put it into perspective kitten itself, like all of the code, if you took all of its node modules and everything comes up to a code base of about one gigabyte and to build kitten itself takes less than a second using Es build. But the apps, the small web apps you build with kitten, they don't have a build process. So it's much more like you were building apps, sorry, web sites and apps at the start of the web, but with all modern technologies and in a peer-to-peer fashion. So that's what kitten is. And the reason I built this wasn't to reinvent the wheel initially. I was using selt kit, I was using these frameworks from big tech, but the problem is these are not built with certain success criteria in mind to build big tech and centralized websites and applications.

(00:26:10):
So they're in a lot of ways overkill and a lot of ways not optimized for a concept of a web where we don't have users where it's for one person, each person owns their own website. So you can really optimize with that because think about it, take Mastodon for example. I don't know if anyone set up their own Mastodon server, but it's not a trivial process because Mastodon is built on a big tech stack. Mastodon is built just like Facebook is built to a large degree using the same technologies, and a Macedon server could serve just one person. I have an instance of one, for example, on my server, but it can also serve a hundred thousand, 500,000 people depending on how mature server scales. And now I think they have clustering in there and whatever. So it can scale indefinitely quite possibly. That's a lot of complexity.

(00:27:03):
So the difference between being able to serve one person and one person or maybe 500,000 people is huge. You take that complexity out of it and you can really optimize for that use case of just one person. This is a site for one person. And so a lot of things I was able to simplify in kitten, it has its own in-process JavaScript database for example that I wrote. It's an append only JavaScript log, and it scales for the purposes that it needs to scale, but it means that when deploying these sites, when everyday people start deploying these sites, it'll make that deployment. It's going to make that deployment so much easier because we don't have to install an out of process database. We don't have to install a transaction queue of some sort, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All these things that we take for granted, which are fine if you're building a centralized system and you have engineers to do that, et cetera, but which make it very difficult for everyday people to own and control their own technologies.

Dan Lynch (00:28:10):
Speaking of owning and controlling, does anybody else contribute to these projects or are you working on them kind of solo right now? How's that looking

Aral Balkan (00:28:18):
At this point? It's me, and that's hopefully not going to be the case throughout, but I think actually that's a feature at the current time because you can, it's evolving in a sense that I'm breaking things all the time with kitten, much less so now, but especially at the very beginning and the way that the small web is going to evolve in terms of the protocols once we actually are able to deploy these sites, and then how do we communicate between them? I want that to be an organic process. So initially it'll be developers, other developers hopefully, and us developing this protocol. But at the very beginning, I think that focus is really important. The thing is, we have hundreds and hundreds of alternatives. We are spoiled for alternatives, we're spoiled for peer-to-peer systems, and very few of these are usable. There's definitely something to be said about a community-based initial approach to things, but I also see those falling into design by committee into kitchen sink design where everything gets put in because hey, let's not make this person unhappy and let's not make this person unhappy. And so we'll put another preference and another preference.

(00:29:37):
I don't really care whether or not what I'm working on succeeds I do, but I really do care that I'm building it in a way which makes it possible for it to succeed, if that makes any sense. And I think part of that is initially being able to iterate really quickly, being able to be very focused in what you're doing, which is hard to do when you have a larger team. So we did a prototype of the small web with the city of Ght a few years ago and where we just said, okay, well what if the city of Gantt in Belgium supported through taxpayer money, everyone in Gantt, all the citizens having their own small web place, so what would that look like? So we prototype that. I had a team working on it there, et cetera, and I really noticed there that having a larger team at this point in time is in some ways a hindrance.

(00:30:39):
I also realized that having political, your funding tied to a political entity is not necessarily the most stable thing. It was a progressive government, local government that was supporting us. The conservatives got into power, they cut our budget immediately. They were like, what is this hippie bs? So yeah, that's why I'm also trying to make sure that what we're building can be sustainable in the current system, but hopefully will help bring about the system that I want to see, which is kind of a post capitalist system, but it has to be sustainable in the current system as well, which for us means maybe you'll pay us 10 euros a month to host your small website. I'm building that hosting solution called Domain that's also free and open source. Everything we do is free and open source. And the reason that's taking longer than it would've otherwise is because I want to make it simple for other organizations to be able to host these domains where small websites can be hosted and so that we don't become a center.

(00:31:43):
We are not the only ones hosting them, but for the city of Gent, that might be everyone gets mailed a token and that's how they can get their place. For us, it might mean if you want to support small technology foundation, you pay us, I don't know, 10 euro a month and maybe that makes us sustainable hopefully in the future, but it means that I don't have to go begging to politicians for money or to the state, which I've spoken twice at the European Parliament. I tried to get them to see. I don't have the energy for that, I don't think. I'm glad that other people are trying, but I think this is where I can make the most impact with what little resources I have.

Dan Lynch (00:32:27):
It sounds like, does that answer

Aral Balkan (00:32:28):
Your question?

Dan Lynch (00:32:29):
It does. It does. Very comprehensively. I didn't mean to put you in a bad position there in saying

Aral Balkan (00:32:32):
Not at all

Dan Lynch (00:32:33):
Can contribute, but I think you're right in that there is no, not at all to be said for the benevolent dictator at the start a project. I mean, if say Lenis turds had got a hundred friends of his to come round and help him create Linux, it wouldn't be what it is now. It might be it's very

Aral Balkan (00:32:47):
Different.

(00:32:50):
But also hopefully I'm building it in a way where we have a very non colonial approach to technology. So that's why of course it has to be free and open source as well. But beyond that, hopefully I'm building it in a way where others can take it and fork it and change aspects of it to suit their use cases. That's why I'm trying to build it in a very modular way in which people can change the various modules at various levels. The approach isn't, I know best for everyone, not at all, not at all. That's why I'm trying to make it so that others can take it and improve it, maybe contribute back. That would be amazing. We've already had contributors, don't get me wrong. I don't want to completely disregard it. We don't have a team working on it. We've had contributors already, people helping out and beyond that, it's definitely not just me.

(00:33:45):
There's an automated script I run whenever I build it and it updates a file called contributors.md based on all of the modules that I'm using from the node ecosystem, there are hundreds and hundreds of people who have already contributed to this, they don't know it. And that's the beauty of free and open source. So it's definitely not me working on it by myself. If anything, I see my role as almost like, I don't know, a conductor. And I think with free and open source, that's kind of the privilege that we have is all of these people have contributed these amazing instruments and you can just sit there as a conductor and kind of go, okay, now a little violin, a bit more piano. So hundreds of people have already contributed to kitten.

Doc Searls (00:34:37):
Fantastic. We have a license question in the queue here, and we'll get to that right after this break.

Dan Lynch (00:34:46):
So we were talking about distribution of stuff, we're talking with Rol about all this kind of stuff. A question that I did have is on your website you say you use a G P L version three as your license. What made that the right choice for you?

Aral Balkan (00:35:02):
So again, I guess this comes to that age old sort of tension between open and free as in freedom, I believe very strongly in share alike as a concept. So A G P L is the closest that I know of an enforceable license that exists in software that has a share alike clause. And what I mean by that is if you are taking from the commons, you must give back to the commons, which I think is only fair as opposed to you can take from the commons and then you can enclose it, which of course is much more interesting if you're a corporation, for example. So that's where an M I T license makes a lot more sense to you because you go or a B S D license because you go, oh, okay, this is great. This is free stuff and I can make it if I want to. That's great for me. I need to do that, right? I mean, that's the basis of all sorts of any sort of privatization. So that's why A G P L, the goal here is not, and it's also to kind of prevent that as well in the future as much as possible. No license is perfect. Any license can be worked around if you wanted to. I mean,

(00:36:26):
Nearly all the code that's specific to this project is code I've written, so I have copyright on that. If I was malicious, I could probably find some way of subverting it. I don't know why I would do that. My whole existence is to make this into a free and open source alternative for the commons, but I probably could if I wanted to. Same with the fact that the small technology foundations are not-for-profit. It is a company limited by guarantee in Ireland. It's the closest I could get to expressing our intent. And I think that's the key thing. Can you again, get around the fact that there's no share capital and still sell out if you wanted to? Yes, of course there is no corporate structure. That means that you can't sell out or you can't turn malicious. But at least I think what you can do is express your intent.

(00:37:15):
And of course, this is why it's free and open source. Even if I were hit in the head tomorrow and completely change how I think about things, the code is still out there. Other people can fork it, other people can continue down the line that hopefully past me would've wanted them to. And I think that's very important, of course. But yeah, that's why A G P L, it's the best way I know of expressing my intent that I don't want this someday enclosed by some corporation, including possibly a corporation that I might be a part of, and I want people to share alike to share back.

Dan Lynch (00:37:53):
So it's really about copy left is what you're saying. That's the whole copy left concept of making sure that people share.

Aral Balkan (00:38:01):
Yeah, basically if you take from the commons, give back to the commons, it's a very simple concept, really. I think the only people who have difficulty understanding it are people who want to take from the commons but not give back to the commons.

Doc Searls (00:38:18):
So I'd like to ask, so do you have a day job or is this supporting itself? This is your day job. So this is how, this is

Aral Balkan (00:38:26):
My day job.

Doc Searls (00:38:27):
So you get enough support from this and how's it going?

Aral Balkan (00:38:32):
So we have people who are supporting us with their patrons and we're not using Patron, et cetera. We have our own little thing that's again, free and open source and doesn't track you or anything. But we have patrons who support us with a monthly donation. Some people have one-off donations that they provide us with that doesn't pay the rent, that does not pay the rent. We're very thankful for it. It does help, but it doesn't pay the rent. And so initially what I did was at the very beginning, 10 years ago, we had one round of crowdfunding at the very beginning when we were starting out. And that got us, I think about a hundred thousand dollars that kept us going for a few years in what we were working on. And then when that ran out, I basically was, I realized that I wanted to devote myself to this problem.

(00:39:29):
I didn't have a solution yet. I was working on solutions. I was iterating. This whole decade has been iteration until I arrived at the small web. So I sold two family homes that we have in Turkey to fund what we're doing because it's very important for me that we remain independent. If we were to take VC venture capital, we couldn't do what we're doing. There's no way that you can take venture capital and do what we want to do to achieve what we want to achieve. We're never going to have an exit. We're never going to be acquired by some huge big tech corporation, and we're not going to I p O and become a publicly traded corporation. We are working in the common good. So when that money ran out and it did eventually run out as well, Laura basically said, Hey, look, I want you to be able to keep working on what you're working on without worrying about it, but I'm going to.

(00:40:24):
I think that means that I'm going to have to go work at a mainstream contract for a mainstream corporation. So Laura now contracts with Stately, which is a startup that works on state charts, and they're probably one of the least evil startups that you can have. And they're just making a tool basically. There's no tracking, there's no, it's not about getting your data or whatever. Of course, they will have to exit. Again, the venture capital game only ends one way. You have to exit or go out of business and hopefully quickly either one of those. So they'll get bought out by some company at some point, but they're making a valuable tool, a valuable technical tool. But it means basically that the contracting money from that is keeping small technology foundation going and allowing me to focus on what I'm building until hopefully domain we can run our own domain and hopefully through the monthly payments that we get be sustainable. And then maybe I might go back to the European parliament and say, look, it's working. If it is working by then, if it is successful, shouldn't we be funding this from the commons for the common good? Shouldn't we be funding this with our taxpayer money? This is what we don't have.

(00:41:45):
I was saying, I spoke twice at the European Parliament and what I told them was, look, you want alternatives to Silicon Valley, you want alternatives to Elon Musk and to X or whatever it is we're calling it this week. And you're not willing to entertain ways of funding that though. So you're not going to get alternatives unless you fund them differently in Silicon Valley. What Silicon Valley does so well, what venture capital does so well is they go, here's 5 million, run with it, iterate, pivot. If you need to do whatever and to five other people or 10 other, nine other people, here's 5 million. You do what you're doing. And they know that nine of those 10 are going to not work. They're going to be unsuccessful. And in Silicon Valley, that's why you need that one out of 10 to be a billion dollar unicorn.

(00:42:43):
And unfortunately, there's no ethical way of becoming that 1 billion unicorn or multi-billion dollar unicorn. What if we took what works with Silicon Valley and instead of making the success criteria becoming a billion dollar unicorn, make the success criteria becoming a value to the commons? So what if we gave 5 million to 10 independent organizations and said, go ahead, pivot, work on it, iterate, but here's our stipulation. You can't exit. You can't sell to a Facebook or a Google. If you're successful, you remain in the Commons, you become a sustainable organization and you keep building whatever you're building for the common good. And I literally just said this at the European Parliament, and there were people just staring at me like, blankly, what planet are you from? What are you talking about? What is this nonsense that could really work? But like I said, I'm done with trying to affect political change. I'm going to build something that hopefully once I built, it cannot be unbuilt, cannot unex exist once it exists. And if it's successful, then I plan on going and saying, here it works. Why aren't you funding this? I think that's a better approach.

Doc Searls (00:43:57):
It sounds a little bit like a community interest corporation, which they had at least in the uk. I worked with a couple of those a few years ago, and Dan's nodding, so they still exist, Dan a kick.

Dan Lynch (00:44:09):
They still exist. I'm a director of one,

Doc Searls (00:44:12):
Which yeah, there's some successful approaches like that. But the commons is so interesting to me, and I mean, right now my wife and I are both visiting scholars at the Ostrom workshop at Indiana University, which is dedicated to the Commons. Eleanor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work on the Commons, and yet it's amazing to me that we have the internet, which is created by a bunch of geeks. We're using base software everywhere. The software in your Android phone, the software in your clock, in your brake system, all of these things, so many things has been made by this process that is inherently commons based and yet is so poorly understood. And I don't know how we can evangelize as well. I mean, I'm one of the evangelists for open source. I have been for a long time, and it's a really hard sell still. And I don't think it's just because, I mean, here in Silicon Valley, you're absolutely right. It is like you run for the exit. There's something broken about that from the get-go. But

Aral Balkan (00:45:25):
I mean, Corey Doctoroff calls it, and I don't really subscribe to that because it was to begin with, there wasn't an ification that happened at the very core. We know at the very beginning that somebody sold an exit to an investor. What you do when you get investment, you don't sell the product, you sell the exit when they make their money back. So they want to know, how am I going to make my money back? I'm giving you this money because I want five times, six times that money back. At least. How am I going to do that? That's what you sell them at the very beginning. So no one goes into this wide-eyed going, oh, I never knew we were going to exit. It's like that's what you sold them at the beginning. Sorry, I cut you off.

Doc Searls (00:46:09):
No, no, that's fine. We were just sort of back channeling about the SS word and is it okay? And I think because in acidification is now part of everybody's vocabulary here in tech world, why not? I don't know. We will bleep it if we

Aral Balkan (00:46:27):
Know what, there's something to be said about calling a pair a pair. I think part of it is there is so much wrong with so many things that I think if you're more worried about how people express their displeasure with things that are wrong or with their righteous anger versus the actual things that are wrong, you probably have your priorities wrong to a degree. I think we need to be much more open to being able to say, look, there's something really bad about this, and I'm quite passionate about the fact that there's something really bad about this. So yeah, I think Corey, Dr. Off's term is the reason I have a problem with it isn't the profanity, it's that I think it makes it seem like there was something good at some point with a business model and a funding model that doesn't have that to begin with.

Doc Searls (00:47:20):
Yeah, let us go a little bit farther with this, but first we have to have a short break.

Aral Balkan (00:47:25):
Sure.

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Doc Searls (00:47:56):
It's interesting to me that everybody understands small business and

Aral Balkan (00:48:02):
How

Doc Searls (00:48:03):
Just coming into a business, I mean in less developed countries, you find 10 mangoes and you could sell 'em on the street, and that's business. And here, if you were to start a nail salon or a barbershop, you set it up and you create value and the value rebut rates. And that's business that it's

Aral Balkan (00:48:25):
Not a zero sum game

Doc Searls (00:48:26):
And it's not a zero sum game. And there's a difference between that and the exploitive side of capitalism. And I think that there's, and the term capitalism is sort of used sometimes to talk about all of business when in fact there is a,

Aral Balkan (00:48:46):
Well, there's a difference between commerce and capitalism as well.

Doc Searls (00:48:50):
Yes, exactly. That's good way

Aral Balkan (00:48:51):
It capitalism

Doc Searls (00:48:53):
Commerce is good and how can we, it troubles me that what's obvious about that to some extent, I mean, commerce does create commons as well, and Joyce and I now live in a small town in Indiana, and there is a sense of an ecosystem there where people are respectful of each other and we have elected representatives and everybody knows each other, and there are contentions. I mean, there's about to apparently go in a homeless shelter down the street from where we just bought a house. We don't have a problem with that, but we have to think about what this means and how it works. But you think constructively about that or you try to,

(00:49:41):
And it seems to be in the general open source world on the whole that happens, but as there's one end of it's getting more corporatized with it where it's all inside the big businesses and there are people working there that I remember with I B M A guy named Dan Fry told me that it took I b m six years before they found out they couldn't tell their kernel developers what to do. It had to be the other way around. And they learned, I mean, apparently they learned, but it's still a tug. It's not a tug of war. It's a kind of tug of interest. But I want your small, this beautiful mentality and thinking and design respect. It's one of the things I've always dug about your work. It's like it isn't just that this is simple and you can look at it in a command line. No, it's like this has UI and it has design to it, and it's still simple, but it's not ugly. And how do we get that respected? How do we get there? I'm not sure, but you're glad you're on

Aral Balkan (00:50:46):
The case. Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. The word, the key word is respect. When we published the Ethical Design Manifesto, it was about three types of respect. Respect for human rights, respect for human effort, and respect for human experience. So at the core of it, it's about respect. The problem we're having, and I think the problem that we're seeing today is we've created an entity, a form in the corporation, in the publicly traded corporation especially, but in the long tail of startups all the way leading up to that where we've almost institutionalized psychopathy. These are psychopaths. We have created psychopaths and in the institutional version of psychopaths, and then we're wondering why they're acting like psychopaths or sociopaths. You take a group of people, you remove them, you remove individual responsibility, and you tell them you have one goal, quarter on quarter revenue growth, quarter on quarter profit growth.

(00:51:55):
That is your one goal. You do that no matter what, and guess what? You're not going to be personally liable for anything. You've created a psychopath. This is the key problem I think systemically. And then we expect good things to come out of this. We can have different structures, we can have different incentives, but unless we change the incentives at the core, I don't think we're going to be able to change what we're getting out of these organizations because they have the wrong success criteria. And especially when we're talking about Silicon Valley, we're talking about limitless growth, exponential growth, infinite growth with finite resources, which to anyone with any understanding of how a closed system works is a euphemism for extinction. And that's what we're seeing in the world today. Things like climate change, et cetera, are not removed from what we're doing in terms of the technologies that we're creating are not removed from our political systems.

(00:52:57):
That's why earlier I was saying, how can we not be political? These are all intertwined. We have a handful of billionaires, a relative, handful of billionaires in the world right now. We have a handful of trillion dollar corporations that are driven only by the need to grow even larger and come what may does that mean ruining our environment, destroying our own habitat? Sure, that's not a problem. Look at our current balance. Things are looking up. We have this really shortsighted thinking, and then we wonder why things are the way that they are. We really need to get off of this unsustainable belief that we can have this infinite growth with finite resources. The world can't afford billionaires. These trillion dollar corporations should not be success stories. They should be the warning tales that we tell our kids. And unless we do that, unless we can affect systemic change, I don't think we're going to necessarily fix this.

(00:54:06):
I think there's a lot you can do by trying to democratize communication and democratize the ability of people to get information, to share information, et cetera, which is what I'm trying to do with a small web. But I'm under no illusion that there isn't any number of lines of code I can write that's going to fix this without political change, without system change, without changing the core of our belief structures and what's good and what's not good. Because if you still think that somebody who's a billionaire who's managed to make billion dollars is a genius or a smart person and is good for the world, we're not going to change this. We're looking at cancer, we're looking at the tumors, and instead of going, that's something we need to get rid of, we're going, we're celebrating the tumors. We're saying that the tumor is a hero. That's the problem.

Dan Lynch (00:55:00):
So that was fascinating, by the way. I could talk about that all day, but I suspect we're coming towards the end of the show, but I want to see,

Aral Balkan (00:55:09):
Where's the code? Don't me, the code.

Dan Lynch (00:55:13):
Tell me the lines of code. Yeah.

Aral Balkan (00:55:14):
What is this wishy-washy BSS that you're talking about? Can

Dan Lynch (00:55:17):
I grab this? If I can grab this? It's fine. Yeah. So I was just wondering about the future of the small web and what you're working on. Have you got an idea, I don't want to say roadmap exactly, but an idea of where you'd like to be, say a year from now or two years from now or whatever?

Aral Balkan (00:55:34):
Yeah. Well, I mean, basically I was hoping to be a little further ahead of where I am. I'm trying to also be kind to myself because there was a time when I was constantly in panic mode. Everything's wrong, and I need to be able to fix this, and that's no way to live. I think I've realized that I'm in this for the long term. I'm in this for the long run. I don't foresee myself working on anything else this lifetime necessarily. So that's the kind of time period I'm thinking of. So I'm giving myself the time to work on this. But that said, of course, we have to ship as well. So hopefully within a matter of months, I want to have domain up and running. Kitten is already quite mature. The only thing it needs is the auto update functionality right now. And I'm reworking the deployment to make it even faster, because right now you can deploy your own small website using domain in about 30 seconds.

(00:56:36):
And so I'm trying to cut that down as much as possible to make it really the same as, here's me getting an account on a centralized system. So I want to have that up within months, not years. So hopefully, if not within this year, at the first half of next year. And then that's when the fund starts. We'll have a very basic version of place, which is the social network that you can install there. Anyone will be able to install any small web app using any domain instance just by providing a Git, U r l if they want to, if they're a developer and they want to play with it themselves. But it be, the experience will be optimized for installing your own place where you can have public posts and you can follow other people and you can send private messages to them, et cetera. So think of it as maybe a peer-to-peer version of Mastodon or something like that.

(00:57:38):
So that's what I'm hoping to launch within a matter of months. So hopefully early next year, first half of next year. And from there, we experiment from there. Hopefully other people build other things. Hopefully other people start hosting their own domains. The way domain works is I've kind of hacked the domain name system in a sense where I'm using the public suffix list, which is a list of domains that ship with every browser that get treated. They're not top level domains like.com or.org, but they get treated as top level domains like.com. Dot org. So small web.org, for example, is on the public suffix list. It's a list maintained by Mozilla currently. And that means that when a browser sees small web.org, it treats it like a.org or a.com, which is important for things like you can't share cookies between sites as security issues, et cetera around it.

(00:58:41):
Really important. But for all intents and purposes, small web.org is a top level domain. Hopefully other people will register their domains on this public Suffolk list and start hosting websites there. That again, makes it very simple for us to host domains at basically our own top level domain, and that makes the 32nd aspect workable. Again, while we're going through the thing with Gantt, Gantt had their own top level domain, but it was run by a commercial entity, and that was the bottleneck. They didn't understand what we were trying to do. They wouldn't make any concessions for optimizing what they're doing. So a lot of in design, it all comes down to, do you have control over every aspect of what you're building right now with Kitten we do. You do have to use A D N S A P I, you do have to use a V P S A P I for hosting it and hopefully that will mean that we can commoditize those and have different V P SS providers, different D N Ss providers, different payment providers for example, for domain hosts to use. But yeah, I want to have a first version of that within a matter of months and have the system up and running, be able to point to it, be able to get developers working with it, and then we'll see where we go from there. Then we're going to iterate. We're going to iterate on the protocols. I want the protocols to be organic, not top down, and we'll see where we go from there.

Doc Searls (01:00:06):
Wow. So much there and a lot to come back to. I hope we have you back on the show. We're pretty much have. I'd love to

Aral Balkan (01:00:14):
And this time I'll get the time zone right as well.

Doc Searls (01:00:18):
It's always a little bit of an issue that, and I have the same problem, but I'm on the east coast sometimes and here we go to uk, Europe. Anyway, it was great. I'm glad you were able to jump to it as fast as you did.

Aral Balkan (01:00:33):
I had the whole thing set up, thankfully. Yeah, and it was really nice seeing you again Doc. We shouldn't leave it this long.

Doc Searls (01:00:41):
Yeah, I know we shouldn't. Absolutely. I really appreciate it and yeah, I'm just seeing you. This is great and you're looking great. Thank you

Aral Balkan (01:00:49):
So much.

Doc Searls (01:00:50):
So we always close this with two questions. What are your favorite text editor in scripting language?

Aral Balkan (01:00:56):
Okay, well text editor, if you'd asked me a few years ago, I never would've given you this answer or thought that I would give you this answer, but I am really loving Helix editor. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's a modal text editor, which is why I would've never Like what? And it's written in rust. And what's really cool is it has this object verb or subject verb styles. So you select something and then you do something to that selection and it's just so intuitive. It works really well. So check it out. Helix editor, I think it's helix editor.com. Free and open source of course. And favorite scripting language? Well, everything I do in terms of scripting these days is in JavaScript. So JavaScript gets a very bad name, but especially if you want a small web, then we definitely, are we out of time? Is that telling us we're out?

Doc Searls (01:01:56):
No, no, no, it's just And playing with the sounds. Okay,

Aral Balkan (01:02:00):
Alright. I'm like JavaScript. So yeah, if we want a small web, part of that is we need to be able to do end-to-end encrypted messaging on it if we want to protect our privacy. And right now, apart from building browser extensions, which again are a step too far for people to expect people to install, to use what we're making, then JavaScript in the browser is essential for us to be able to keep the secret keys on people's own devices. So your secret never leaves your device, it doesn't go to the server. And so yeah, JavaScript, it's what kitten uses on the server and in the browser. And it's not your dad's JavaScript or your mom's JavaScript. It's come along a long way. You can use any language badly, but I think JavaScript these days is a great, great language as long as you don't try to add numbers and strings together.

Doc Searls (01:03:00):
Great. Well we will have to have you back.

Aral Balkan (01:03:03):
I would love to.

Doc Searls (01:03:04):
This has been terrific. Thank you so much for being on the show. We appreciate it. Thanks

Aral Balkan (01:03:09):
For having me, doc. Thank you. Thank you both.

Doc Searls (01:03:13):
So Dan, that was great. That was really great and especially,

Dan Lynch (01:03:18):
Yeah, so great. I mean, you got the impression there. We could talk all day. I think we could definitely do a four hour show, but we don't want to do a four hour show right now. So I think that's really good. Such good stuff they're doing as well. Really great work I think,

Doc Searls (01:03:32):
And I love where Earl's coming from and always have, we need our human moral anchors as well as our sort of basic principled ones, the golden rule and stuff like that. I think there aren't enough of us, it's old school. I mean, this is sort of where it all started and I want to keep it there if we can, and having voices like his in the wilderness that is modern society and politics and the rest of it is really important. Yeah, definitely. So what are your plugs? You actually ran late long today, so

Dan Lynch (01:04:13):
That's okay. It's really simple. If anybody wants to find any music, podcasts, anything else that I do, you can find it@danlynch.org, which is my website and not on the small web yet, but it will be soon. Hopefully. You never know. We'll figure that out. Yeah, so just go there. That's the place to go.

Doc Searls (01:04:31):
Okay, great. And next week, I didn't even have to look at the schedule to know this is going to be Mad Dog, mad Dog Hall himself is going to be back. Don't have a co-host lined up yet, but we shall have one by then. In any case, that's a week from today and I'll be back in Indiana and I think Mad Dog's going to be in his house in New Hampshire, and we'll be able to take it from there. So we will see you then.

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