Our idea with Portal (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portalplatform.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portalplatform.net&#x2F;</a>) is to make it possible for regular people to run the exact same kind of Linux servers that many of us on HN run.<p>We&#x27;re using stock Ubuntu cloud images w&#x2F;CloudInit so everything that runs on Portal will run anywhere Linux VMs run. Once there are some standards for importing&#x2F;exporting data we&#x27;re going to make that a one-click operation. Users can already download all of their data and completely wipe all remote copies.<p>The original promise of the internet was that we would all control our own domain names. Instead we ended up @gmail.com facebook.com, and twitter.com. We can fix this for less than $10&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo now.