Digital Sovereignty
Self-Hosted Infrastructure, Open Source, and Data Ownership.
Planned
Running services on machines you control changes who holds your data and who decides when a service changes or disappears. This book will cover what that takes in practice: hardware and hosting choices, open source services that replace rented ones, data formats and export paths that preserve the ability to move, and the maintenance routine that keeps a self-hosted stack healthy over years.
Status: planned title. Writing has not started. The repository and the cover exist; the scope below is the plan.
The first edition will ship DRM-free as PDF and EPUB, with free updates.
Owning the stack, from hardware to data.
No chapters are written yet. This is the plan: the areas the book will cover, in the order a reader would meet them. It covers current open source tooling on infrastructure you control.
- The case for sovereignty What dependence on hosted platforms costs, what data ownership means in practice, and where self-hosting is worth the effort.
- Infrastructure you control Hardware at home and in colocation, virtualization and containers, and the network path between your services and the internet.
- The open source stack Services for mail, files, calendars, photos, git, and chat, and how to judge a project's health before depending on it.
- Data ownership in practice Open formats, export paths, and encryption at rest and in transit, so data stays readable and movable.
- Backup and recovery Backup schemes with off-site copies that survive hardware loss and mistakes, tested by restoring.
- Operating it long term Updates, monitoring, and security exposure, sized for one person or a small team.
For people who want to run their own services.
This book is for engineers and technical readers who run their own infrastructure, or weigh doing so. It assumes comfort with the command line and basic server administration, and it explains trade-offs rather than listing recipes.
- Engineers who host services for themselves or their family and want the setup dependable enough that other people can rely on it.
- Small companies weighing self-hosting against managed services and needing a clear view of the real costs on both sides.
- Operators already self-hosting who want structure: backups that restore and data that stays portable.
Planned.
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