Clojurians Log v2

This is really interesting, and something we've also been thinking a lot about. In addition to defn, Ray and I do a podcast called https://politechs.dev/, which explores the inherent political nature of technology from a Luddite perspective. We're slowly but surely building up a software stack for podcast production because we want to free ourselves from the platforms, and one thing I personally am struggling with is the idea of SaaS at all. I like your sovereignty lens, because it allows for thinking about different scopes of sovereigns, from the personal all the way up to the global. What I know I don't like is corporate sovereignty over platforms. Some platforms feel OK to me, such as https://www.zetk.in, a set of organising tools that is offered as a platform, though only to organisations with compatible political philosophies to the Zetkin Foundation's. They also offer it on prem, to accommodate organisations like Die Linke, a German left party that takes privacy very seriously indeed. I do think that platforms are inherently dangerous, though, so it's vital that those who are sovereign over the platform make some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact to guarantee that no one individual can exercise anti-democratic rule in a moment of weakness. Anyway, like I said, we should talk about this on the air!

I'm coming around to a notion of "sovereign software systems"... where "sovereign" is individual, team, business, community, neighbourhood, polity, region. Each need to be "sovereign" in different ways. For example, individuals need sovereign = free as in speech software, and private as in my data. Polities can perhaps work with sovereign = free as in beer (public goods / services), and region-contained information (possibly with multilateral redundancies like gold reserves), which is built primarily on the foundation of individual sovereignty. The in-between sovereigns => the "we" unit owns our own software and data and can do with it as we please. So, if it is a SaaS, we have rights to data access in perpetuity (because it's "our" data). Any SaaS obviously cannot host it forever, so they ought to use a software + data architecture that lets users "takeout" their stuff in a user-accessible way with no configuration or fiddling about. They need not provide their intellectual property (app), but the data cannot be held hostage by the SaaS model. Pro-commerce, pro-democracy, and pro-individual. I think it's important to have all three.

All big talk of course --- I, armchair critic, know how to solve most world problems. Talk is cheap, without working software. So my problem, as a wee little wannabe indie SaaS provider is "how the hell do I do it without going insane?". That's what I'm exploring as we speak, er, type. 1. I personally cannot, under any circumstance keep up with the privacy and data residency requirements of people, for example. 2. My brain is also too small to manage a "dual" architecture; viz. "just use Postgres" in the backend (which is the easy path), but also somehow export tenant-specific data in a user-accessible format (without needing my SaaS hosting or bandwidth or storage to access it and do as they please). 3. My pocket is also too small to pay for managed PaaS services, which are geared to solve organisation-class IT problems (we don't want to sink cash into CAPEX, we want OPEX and IT capacity flexibility even if it costs 10x on per unit basis). But my problem is "I want to do everything if possible using two smol hetzner VMs (one to serve, one for failover)".

So it creates a forcing function that is, well, forcing me to find the conceptually smallest arrangement of software parts and data management trickshots that are as universally applicable as I can make it. One side-effect ought to be "zero DB migrations, forever". I thought it was absurd to try for this secret desire, but the Netflix people speaking at the Conj have made it painfully clear that it is worth trying... even if it means dying on this hill (because I can't use Datomic for <reasons>).

Um, yeah, so we're gonna need you to go ahead and talk about this on the air.