Back in 2005, while cypherpunks were grinding their way into Bitcoin, I was deep into an idea we called "Sovereign Computing": a set of freedoms that would re-create the web with the user, and not corporations, at the center of it. It was initially proposed by Klaus Wuestefeld, one of the senior engineers who shaped most of my early career. The apps we made are mostly gone (turns out CVS wasn't the future of version control), but most of those freedoms still hold quite well.



At the time, everything was deeply tied to ISPs, DNS, and several middle-layer providers that limited your expressiveness on the web by charging for everything. IRC was coming to the end of its downfall. We were slowly becoming slaves of big tech.

Klaus wrote a manifesto that lured people into developing several little projects that could decentralize everything. Many of them were P2P mesh networks where users could talk to each other directly (without servers) and even re-share their own internet connection with their trusted peers. It was a big f*** you to people that thought they could control us.

Free Software users or not, they were no more than subjects conforming to the arbitrary laws dictated by a handful of Internet authorities. People got fed up with that monkey business. They decided they would be free to share information and hardware resources with their friends at their own pleasure.

This is how the manifesto went:

Freedom 1 - Own Name

It is the freedom to choose any name for oneself. The format of the chosen name is not limited in any way, even in the case of homonyms, and there is the possibility to change the chosen name at will.

Freedom 2 - Nicknames

It is the freedom to choose any name to refer to others. This freedom is not limited to persons, but applies to anything accessible in the virtual world. This freedom is based on the notion that absolute addressing schemes imply in the abdication of one's freedom in favor of some central authority. According to this, the alternative would be relative addressing schemes centered on each person.

Freedom 3 - Trust

It is the freedom to trust anyone one wishes. It is the possibility to assign a degree of trustworthiness to any person, possibly depending on the subject (for example, one's opinion on music could be highly trusted, but not on cars or economy). Also, the degree of someone's trustworthiness would depend on the relative distance to other persons (for example, one would trust more one's friend than one's friend's friend).

Freedom 4 - Privacy

This freedom has two aspects: the freedom to see only what one wants, and the freedom to keep information inaccessible to untrusted people. One application of the first aspect would be avoiding spam by only accepting messages from people above a certain degree of trustworthiness.

Freedom 5 - Expression

It is the freedom to express oneself. It is not only the freedom to expose one's thoughts but also the freedom to make syntheses of information provided by other people.

Freedom 6 - Hardware

This is the freedom to share hardware resources. This is based on the assumption that most hardware resources are underused, especially among domestic users. By federating the resources of a large number of people, it would be possible to decrease the dependency on internet providers and internet hosts.

Freedom 7 - Software

It is the freedom to share all software one uses. It is based on free software that is spread through trust networks across the globe. There is no need for a single, centralized distribution point.



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It's bizarre to see how many of those early thoughts can be seen now in Nostr. Maybe one day we will fully free ourselves from the web's overlords.