Taking back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty, beyond Ethereum

2026 is the year we take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty.

But this applies far beyond the blockchain world.

In 2025, I made two major changes to the software I use:

• Switched almost fully to https://fileverse.io/ (open source encrypted decentralized docs)
• Switched decisively to Signal as primary messenger (away from Telegram). Also installed Simplex and Session.

This year changes I've made are:

• Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/, OrganicMaps https://organicmaps.app/ is the best mobile app I've seen for it. Not just open source but also privacy-preserving because local, which is important because it's good to reduce the number of apps/places/people who know anything about your physical location
• Gmail -> Protonmail (though ultimately, the best thing is to use proper encrypted messengers outright)
• Prioritizing decentralized social media (see my previous post)

Also continuing to explore local LLM setups. This is one area that still needs a lot of work in "the last mile": lots of amazing local models, including CPU and even phone-friendly ones, exist, but they're not well-integrated, eg. there isn't a good "google translate equivalent" UI that plugs into local LLMs, transcription / audio input, search over personal docs, comfyui is great but we need photoshop-style UX (I'm sure for each of those items people will link me to various github repos in the replies, but the whole problem is that it's "various github repos" and not one-stop-shop). Also I don't want to keep ollama always running because that makes my laptop consume 35 W. So still a way to go, but it's made huge progress - a year ago even most of the local models did not yet exist!

Ideally we push as far as we can with local LLMs, using specialized fine-tuned models to make up for small param count where possible, and then for the heavy-usage stuff we can stack (i) per-query zkp payment, (ii) TEEs, (iii) local query filtering (eg. have a small model automatically remove sensitive details from docs before you push them up to big models), basically combine all the imperfect things to do a best-effort, though ultimately ideally we figure out ultra-efficient FHE.

Sending all your data to third party centralized services is unnecessary. We have the tools to do much less of that. We should continue to build and improve, and much more actively use them.

(btw I really think @SimpleXChat should lowercase the X in their name. An N-dimensional triangle is a much cooler thing to be named after than "simple twitter")