Many non-profit, community, and activist organizations I speak to have one question for me: How do we get off of Google? Can we own our own data?

At Habitat, we are trying to make this an attainable reality for them, through a platform that provides primitives to manage an organization, build bespoke software, and host your data in a way that interoperates with many applications. While this unlocks many possibilities, it also introduces friction: while hardware is expensive to maintain; cloud compute is cheap and we're not used to thinking about our software's infrastructure. However, this friction can be reframed as a feature. By raising awareness of what resources it actually takes to support our seamless workflows, we can build new infrastructural networks to support ourselves and each other in the goal of building a more distributed and resilient internet.

This talk will cover my experiences as CEO and co-founder of Habitat navigating this friction, and focus on one feature I'm particularly excited about: co-hosting. If one group is running Habitat on servers they own, they can allow and invite other groups to run on the same infrastructure, rather than only having the choice between Habitat's cloud managed hosting or self-hosting it themselves. This approach scales at the speed of trust between organizations, and is a simple way to strike a balance between the ease in which we expect to setup software today and the friction required to actually take back the web and neutralize the dominating players.