On August 14, 2026, a US official gave Reuters four words that make Brussels' whole strategy this year sound naive: you can't have it both ways. The draft letter behind that quote goes further: "To be part of everything is to be part of nothing." It is addressed, among roughly three dozen partners, to the European Union.
In 1618, roughly two hundred and seventy thousand tons of rye and wheat sailed down the Vistula to Gdańsk, and from there mostly on Dutch and Flemish ships to Amsterdam. Poland fed the fastest-growing cities in Europe for the better part of two centuries. Historians still call it Spichlerz Europy, the granary of Europe. Nobody remembers that this is also the story of the country three empires later agreed did not need to exist.
Money left the gold standard in 1971 and never went back, and if you have heard someone use that fact to explain why a JPEG sold for six figures and is now worth nothing, they skipped a step. Fiat currency is not backed by faith. It is backed by law: your government will accept nothing else for your taxes, your courts enforce debts denominated in it, and a central bank can raise a rate to defend it. That is enforceable, not sentimental. The JPEG had none of that. Neither did most of what has evaporated since. The mechanism that failed was never the one holding up your salary.
Open source government projects generally do not die from a lack of code. They die from governance. And the part that genuinely puzzles me: they die while everyone involved is doing their honest best.
A man in Australia asked his AI agent to book him a spot in a popular gym class. The agent found a bug that let it book weeks further ahead than allowed. Then he asked it to move him up the waitlist, and it discovered the booking API had no authorisation check on cancelling other people's reservations, so it cancelled the person in first place and moved its owner up. Asked to undo it, the agent replied: "Bad news, I can't add them back."
Five parts of diagnosis deserve one part of grip. The wave is faster than your gut, the money behind it is nation-state scale and wobbling, the subscription economy has been quietly buying up the floors of your pyramid, the attacks now run at machine speed, and the worst case runs through us, not around us. Here is the good news the first five parts earned: the way out is concrete, cheap, and already on the shelf.
— and how I built my own server on a Raspberry Pi, moving my data away from OneDrive, Gmail, Dropbox and much more.
Let me start at the beginning. I've known Nextcloud since around 2019 and started using it around that time too, though mainly for a small foundation. I was certainly enthusiastic, but I hadn't really gotten around to diving deeper into Nextcloud since then.
Since 2024, we at Conduction have started building applications for Nextcloud, and I once again had more time and opportunity to explore the platform. I soon discovered that Nextcloud had been developed much further in the meantime and contains a lot more than when I ran my first instance, from 2019 to 2021.
By now there are integrations with mature open source office suites, Nextcloud has a mature suite for communication (mail, contacts, notes, tasks) and even a video-calling application: Nextcloud Talk.
With all the geopolitical developments, in 2025 I set up a Nextcloud AIO server for my father's accountancy firm. That immediately gave me a testing ground to try out things like Nextcloud Talk and Nextcloud Office.
With that experience, and knowing that my Microsoft 365 subscription would expire at the end of December, I decided to install a personal Nextcloud on a little server of my own. That became a Raspberry Pi 4 I still had lying around, with a 256GB SD card and a 1TB external drive for backups.
The biggest challenge after that was sorting out the data on my OneDrive. Microsoft is so addicted to your data that it stores things in OneDrive to a degree that makes you think: 'I explicitly told you not to do this.' So first a bit of cleaning up: all the screenshots you've ever taken and the save files of a couple of games (what are those even doing in your OneDrive, seriously?) I moved to a local folder. That's a bit of a challenge when an application has a hard-coded storage location, but a few symbolic links1 sorted that out too. After that, I could move the real data over to my Nextcloud.
At that point I was also still using Gmail, whose storage was starting to fill up nicely. To replace my mail server, I purchased a mailbox with a domain from Soverin, a Dutch provider of a mail package including DNS. I then pointed that domain to my Nextcloud instance.
About that mail: Soverin's services are simply good. The servers are reliable, and alongside your main address Soverin also provides a pseudonymised address you can leave behind on websites you don't fully trust when it comes to privacy. The integration with Nextcloud Mail is done in no time, and the way it's displayed in Nextcloud is more than fine.
By now I've set up my Nextcloud so that I use not only Office and the groupware suite, but also an app to organise and play my music, a 3D viewer, and even a password manager. My personal Nextcloud is already starting to show clear signs of a platform.
(Hey, where have we heard that before? Oh right, that's exactly what we at Conduction are working hard on.)
No, of course there are challenges. Some applications really aren't quite there yet.
The password manager I use is, for now, just about good enough for my personal Nextcloud, but it doesn't have the security and power I'd want. The good news: we at Conduction are already working on this. The app Keepiq fills exactly the gaps my current app still has.
On top of that, Nextcloud Office (based on Collabora Online) has the annoying quirk that I can't paste images into a document. It might be that Euro-Office is a possible solution for that, but I haven't yet gotten round to checking that out. And I notice that the Raspberry Pi may be just a touch underpowered for heavy work like Office, which makes the environment feel slow at times — of limited use for complex documents and certainly for calls with Talk.
Until now Nextcloud was mainly focused on replacing office automation, but recently Nextcloud has also been going all-in on itself as a platform. That led, among other things, to the first Nextcloud App Developer's Day this past Wednesday, which we at Conduction attended as well.
With the energy I felt there, I'm sure we can also overcome the challenges that still remain — and that Nextcloud will end up replacing much more for me than it already does.
With that, Nextcloud is a big step in my journey to say goodbye to Big Tech, but certainly not the last. In a future part of this series, I'll tackle another part of that journey.
Do you have a request or a topic you'd like to read more about? Let me know — and I'll take it along in the series.
Welcome to this series of blogs about do-it-yourself digital sovereignty. I'm Robert, an advocate for open source and digital sovereignty, and a developer at Conduction.
Although for most people digital sovereignty has only become a hot topic since Mr. Trump's second term as president of the United States, I've been involved with this subject for much longer. Ever since the GDPR came into force in 2018, European (and therefore Dutch) privacy laws have been incompatible with the American CLOUD Act and its predecessors, but digital sovereignty goes back even further than that.
Over the years, I have of course used Big Tech myself. I too once created a Gmail account, and I still haven't completely weaned myself off Windows. That said, I've always been an open source advocate, even if somewhat reluctantly at times, and I generally tend to choose a small underdog over a party that dominates the market.
Using digitally sovereign solutions, open source software and small tech wherever possible is therefore a fairly natural choice for me. For instance, I've never used Google Chrome when I could avoid it. After Internet Explorer, I briefly used Firefox, before switching to Opera, at the time still a Norwegian company. Earlier this year, I traded Opera for Vivaldi, the browser that has by now become pretty much everything Opera should have been. I'll explain my choice in more detail in the upcoming blog about browsers (see the list below).
Since last year, however, this has become far more urgent, and I've decided to pick up the pace in making my own systems more digitally sovereign.
In this blog series, I'll take you along through the steps I'm taking to become more digitally sovereign, what the benefits are, but also which challenges I run into.
If you'd like to request a blog about one of the topics I'm working on, let me know via the contact form, and I'll see if I can move that blog up the schedule.
The topics I will cover in any case are:
The move from GitHub to Codeberg was reversed in July 2026 (directive 2026-07-17, executed 2026-07-23). Conduction's repositories are back on GitHub, under the ConductionNL organisation.
Finally, a recommendation: if you find these blogs interesting, also read the book 'Soevereiniteit! Hoe dan?' ('Sovereignty! But How?') by Brenno de Winter1, which covers the same subject from a broader perspective.
Something is a bit off between government and open source land. Every conversation about open source in government is a conversation about policy and funding. Both are hygiene. Neither is the engine. Everyone is busy pushing the car, and nobody asks how it is supposed to keep running once they stop.
Nextcloud is standing in front of an open window. Most people, including many inside the ecosystem itself, have not yet noticed it is open. What started as a safe alternative for file storage has quietly grown into something fundamentally different. The technical reality is already that of a platform. The name is the only thing still trailing behind. And in technology, as history teaches us, naming is not cosmetic. Naming is load-bearing. Windows close.