About web3home
Building Infrastructure for Digital Independence
"Freedom is the mother of Innovation and the grandmother of prosperity"
web3home represents a fundamental shift from centralized cloud dependency to community-powered digital sovereignty. We're building infrastructure that enables true digital independence without sacrificing functionality, security, or community connection.
The Problem We're Solving
Digital Serfdom
The current technology landscape forces a false choice between convenience and control:
Centralized Cloud Services offer seamless experiences but at the cost of data ownership, privacy, and long-term autonomy. Users become digital serfs, dependent on platforms that can change terms, raise prices, or disappear entirely.
DIY Self-Hosting provides complete control but demands significant technical expertise, lacks redundancy, and isolates users from network effects and community support.
Specific Pain Points
Data Commoditization: Personal information flows through systems optimized for extraction, not protection. Users have nominal consent but no practical control.
Subscription Fatigue: The average user spends more than $1,600 per year on subscriptions, including cloud and chatbot services.
AI Security Dilemma: Modern AI capabilities require either surrendering sensitive data to third-party cloud services or accepting significantly reduced functionality.
Systemic Fragility: Centralized architectures create single points of failure affecting millions simultaneously. One outage can lock users out of email, files, communications, and authentication.
Vendor Lock-in: Switching costs, both technical and psychological trap users in ecosystems that may not serve their long-term interests.
Our Solution: Community-Powered Sovereignty
web3home offers a third path that combines personal control with network resilience:
Core Innovation
Transform powerful consumer hardware into distributed infrastructure where users:
- Own their complete digital stack: data, processing, identity, communications
- Contribute to community resilience: peer redundancy without centralized infrastructure
- Maintain privacy while gaining capability: federated learning and collective intelligence without data exposure
- Reduce costs while increasing independence: computational sharing replaces subscription dependency
The Sovereignty Grid Model
web3home implements integrated sovereignty across five critical domains:
Communication Sovereignty: Censorship-resistant channels, encrypted peer-to-peer messaging, self-hosted coordination infrastructure.
Computational Sovereignty: Local AI processing, private model training, distributed computing without cloud dependencies.
Data Sovereignty: Complete ownership of personal information with encrypted storage, local processing, and zero-knowledge architectures.
Financial Sovereignty: Self-custody digital assets, DeFi access without intermediaries, private transactions under user control.
Identity Sovereignty: Self-owned credentials, selective disclosure, verifiable identity without central authorities.
These domains are fundamentally interconnected. Financial sovereignty without secure communications creates vulnerability. Data sovereignty without computational independence maintains dependence on third-party processing. Identity sovereignty without communication channels lacks practical utility.
web3home provides the integrated infrastructure layer enabling sovereignty across all five domains simultaneously.
Current Development Status
web3home is in active research and development. We're solving fundamental technical challenges that have prevented mass adoption of self-hosted infrastructure:
Technical Challenges
DNS and Networking: Home servers face dynamic IP addresses, NAT traversal complexity, and network discovery challenges. We're testing approaches from dynamic DNS to mesh networking to VPN-based solutions.
High Availability: Creating redundancy without cloud dependencies requires novel approaches to peer coordination, data replication, and failover mechanisms.
Container Orchestration: Consumer hardware has different characteristics than data center infrastructure. We're evaluating platforms from Docker Swarm to Podman to lightweight Kubernetes distributions.
Security Architecture: Distributed systems create distributed security challenges. We're designing threat models for peer authentication, data encryption, and access control in home network contexts.
Deployment Complexity: Making enterprise-grade infrastructure accessible requires automating configuration, certificate management, monitoring, and updates.
Development Approach
We're building web3home in the open because transparency builds trust and community input improves outcomes. Our development journal documents:
- Technical architecture decisions and trade-offs
- Performance testing on real consumer hardware
- Security model design and threat analysis
- Failed experiments and lessons learned
- Open technical questions needing community expertise
Follow our development progress →
Technical Vision
Hardware Foundation
web3home targets modern consumer hardware with specifications that enable serious computational sovereignty:
- RAM: 128GB+ (enables local deployment of 70B parameter LLMs)
- CPU/GPU: AMD Strix Halo, similar high-end consumer chips
- Storage: 4TB+ NVMe SSD for fast local processing
- Cost: $1,500-2,500 per device
This represents a deliberate strategic choice: premium hardware for true capability rather than compromised specifications limiting functionality.
Software Architecture
Container-Based: Isolated services with resource management and orchestration
Mesh Networking: Secure peer-to-peer communication without central coordination
Distributed Storage: Replicated data across trusted community nodes
Zero-Knowledge Protocols: Privacy-preserving coordination and computation
Automated Operations: Self-healing infrastructure with minimal manual intervention
Service Integration
Core sovereignty services deployed through web3home:
- Personal Cloud: File storage, synchronization, and sharing (Nextcloud, Syncthing)
- Communication Hub: Encrypted messaging and coordination (Matrix, Nostr)
- AI Sovereignty: Local language models with personal data integration (Ollama, LM Studio)
- Identity Management: Self-sovereign credentials and authentication
- Smart Infrastructure: IoT control and home automation integration
- Security Stack: Password management, VPN gateway, network isolation
- Development Environment: Local version control, CI/CD, testing infrastructure
Market Context
Timing Convergence
Multiple technological and market trends create ideal conditions for web3home:
Hardware Democratization: 128GB+ RAM devices now available at consumer prices. Five years ago this capability cost $10,000+; today it's $1,500+.
Open-Source Maturation: Enterprise-grade self-hosting tools have reached accessibility thresholds. Container technologies, mesh networks, and distributed systems tools are battle-tested.
Privacy Consciousness: GDPR compliance costs, AI data breaches, and high-profile incidents drive awareness. 40%+ of organizations expect AI-related data breaches by 2027.
Economic Pressure: Subscription fatigue and economic uncertainty motivate alternatives to perpetual cloud costs.
AI Democratization: Open-source models now rival proprietary alternatives. Local deployment becomes viable for serious use cases.
Competitive Landscape
Self-Hosting Platforms (Umbrel, Start9): Limited to 16GB RAM maximum, preventing serious AI workloads. Focus on cryptocurrency nodes rather than comprehensive digital sovereignty.
NAS Vendors (Synology, QNAP): Proprietary systems with cloud integration focus. Business models centered on vendor lock-in rather than sovereignty.
Cloud Providers (AWS, GCP, Azure): Centralized architectures fundamentally opposing sovereignty principles. Convenience through dependence.
DIY Solutions: Fragmented, technically demanding, lacking community coordination and redundancy.
web3home differentiates through holistic integration, superior hardware specifications, community resilience architecture, and aligned economic incentives.
Who We Are
We are a group of developers and technologists passionate about digital sovereignty, working to solve the technical complexity that prevents mass adoption of self-hosted infrastructure.
We believe freedom and privacy are prerequisites for innovation and prosperity, not obstacles to overcome. Our mission is to build the infrastructure layer that makes digital independence accessible to everyone, without compromising capability.
Our Principles
Privacy by Default: User data never leaves user-controlled infrastructure unless explicitly intended.
Open Source: Complete transparency enables auditing, forking, and community contribution.
Community-First: Individual sovereignty strengthened through voluntary peer cooperation.
Technical Excellence: No compromises on security, performance, or capability.
Honest Communication: Transparent about capabilities, limitations, and development status.
Get Involved
We're seeking technical contributors to help solve hard distributed systems problems:
Technical Expertise Needed:
- DevOps and infrastructure automation
- Network engineering (NAT traversal, mesh networks, security)
- Distributed systems (consensus, replication, fault tolerance)
- Security architecture and threat modeling
- Full-stack development for management interfaces
Ways to Contribute:
- Review and critique our technical architecture
- Share self-hosting experience and lessons learned
- Test early prototypes when available
- Help document technical decisions and procedures
- Form local testing communities
Future Roadmap
Phase 1: Foundation (Current)
- Container orchestration platform selection
- Core networking stack implementation
- Security model design and implementation
- Initial service integration and testing
Phase 2: Community Features (Q1 2026)
- Multi-node coordination protocols
- Resource sharing and replication
- Community formation tools
- Deployment automation
Phase 3: User Experience (Q2-Q3 2026)
- Management interface and monitoring
- One-command deployment system
- Comprehensive documentation
- Beta testing program
Phase 4: Network Effects (Q4 2026)
- Federated learning implementation
- Cross-community service sharing
- Advanced AI capabilities
- Mass market accessibility
Contact
Technical Discussions: Forum
Development Updates: Subscribe to newsletter
Community Forum: [Coming soon]
GitHub: [Coming soon]
web3home is building the infrastructure for digital independence. Follow our journey as we solve the technical challenges of making sovereignty accessible.