Neil BrownNew blogpost:
"Musings on 'digital sovereignty'"
I wanted to jot down some of my thoughts, before I forgot them.
The more I think about it, the less clear the whole thing seems...
https://neilzone.co.uk/2026/03/musings-on-digital-sovereignty/
Paul Sutton (zleap)Nice article, I think your definition is fair. So I will try and comment further, I think trying to reduce reliance is the end game, or at least reliance on big tech companies. So I am using LinuxMint, firefox, LibreOffice etc but also using Overleaf (LaTeX) which is via a website. Data / projects is saved in their cloud, which makes it easier to access from any device that can access the internet.
With regard to geographic borders, I think in the case of the EU they want solutions that keep everything within the EU Law juristiction, esp around the GDPR, so data on EU citizens stays under their control.
I don't think we can be fully soveriegn, programs will have updates esp around security, so we then rely on the people writing the software to id problems and implement / distribute patches, as we have seen with Microsoft, evey they get it wrong and an update can cause real issues (that is just an example,) and Microsoft also rely on 3rd parties who control other infrastructure.
2/2
This can impact anyone, if cloudflare (or what ever they are called) goes down, so does any connected services.
When we look at cost of free software, we should remember the free means freedom it still costs money to install and run the software, or it costs YOU time and effort to set up and learn how to use it.
No such thing as free as in cost.
So it means different things to different people and it is important to critically think your situation when trying to move towards digital soverienty, even being here you are at the mercy of admins keeping an instance open, they could be at the mercy of their employment (salary helps pay for hosting). Even if you then self host, you have costs.