Building a sovereign stack

Ecosia is an ad-powered search engine that uses all of its profits for climate action; it's planted over 250 million trees, making it the world's largest planter of native trees. Going through Ecosia's verdant onboarding process I thought: "Is this European values in practice?" I felt virtuous and searchuous.

An email before a model

Next, I wanted an LLM to help me research my transnational patriotic project. There was only one choice here: France's frontier model builder, Mistral. But before I could use it, I needed to make an account — which meant I needed an email. A European email.

A little Ecosia research later, I decided on German-built Mailbox.org. I chose it over several options, including Proton Mail, because it also provides calendar functionality and video calls. Never mind that the video-call area of the website is all in German. It's fine. Mailbox has functionality, but no style.

The branding of the different email offerings was a fascinating look at how one might differentiate in a world where Gmail and Outlook rule. Most went hard on privacy. Soverin, a Dutch alternative, was quoted as being “for email what Durex is for sex. Nice and safe.” Others went hard on sustainability: Runbox from Norway brands itself as the “world's leading hydropowered email service.” Why they're not number one, I'm not sure — and why they haven't built a website that doesn't look like it was made in 2012, I'm also not sure. I digress.

Where European ends

So I had my German email and my Mistral account — but I couldn't connect any apps in Mistral to bring outside context into my conversations. Outlook and Gmail connect easily; there is no Mailbox MCP (model context protocol, the API layer of LLMs) readily available. To make that connection and have reliable, always-on access to my email through Mistral, I'd need a virtual private server — my own little slice of a machine. The European option favoured by engineers is, again, German: Hetzner.

I've signed up for Hetzner, which will cost me a few euros a month — but Hetzner is notorious for its verification checks. Because it's so cheap, scammers love it, so I need my physical passport to get verified, and I can't do that until I'm home. Sigh.

The Hetzner signup also showed me the limits of choosing European. While Hetzner's servers are located in Germany, the chips they run on are American. It was a reminder that digital sovereignty has to cross into the physical world at some point. (And one could argue I'm cheating on this whole exercise by typing on a Chinese-built keyboard, using a Mac.) Hardware, crushing my sovereign dreams.

The word-processing part was the easiest — sweet relief. A team of ex-DeepMind engineers is building a Google Docs alternative in London called Marker, which I've been using for months.

How long is a piece of string?

After day one, my conclusion is that this task is the software equivalent of asking how long a piece of string is. Software is built on so many layers that it's hard to separate out anything truly European. I'm also aware I'm looking for solutions that fit a small startup — at the enterprise level, “hydropowered email” probably doesn't fly.

I was struck by the marketing of these tools, and their focus on values like environmental friendliness and security. People say they care about those things — but do they choose products based on them? There's little evidence they do, broadly. Coming up in my stack: I'm talking to Slack alternative Slashwork on Monday to get onboarded, and I'll finally get verified on Hetzner.

This is the first entry in a running notebook. Members: tell me what you'd add to the stack — I'm taking suggestions in the comments.