Isn't this what nation-state sovereignty is about?

Same idea, different scale. The technical shapes and the ethical arguments line up.

Do I have to pick a European provider?

You don't have to pick any provider at all for this specific folder. That's the whole point.

Answers/The movement queries

Digital sovereignty for one person — not nations, not enterprises, you

'Digital sovereignty' shows up in EU policy papers, in Amsterdam's Digital Autonomy Strategy, in national procurement rules. It is almost always framed at the scale of a government or a large enterprise — 'we should not be dependent on foreign cloud providers for critical services'. The same logic scales down. If it is unwise for a city to hand its citizen records to a single overseas provider, it may be unwise for one person to hand their entire private life to the same provider, in the same conditions.

The individual case

You depend on a small number of large companies for your email, your files, your photos, your notes, your calendar, your passwords. Each dependency is a policy risk (they may change what they do), a legal risk (they may be compelled to hand over what they hold), and a continuity risk (they may disappear or lock you out).

You cannot un-depend from all of them at once. You can pick one — often the file layer — and step off, and be more careful about the rest.

One folder as a sovereignty pilot

Pick the folder that would hurt most if it were leaked. Move it off the cloud. Encrypt it at rest. Back it up on media you own. That single folder — sovereign by every meaningful test — is a small proof that the setup is possible; extending it later is easier.

Elba is built for that one folder: local, encrypted, no account, no server, becomes open source in 2030.

Questions people actually ask

Isn't this what nation-state sovereignty is about?: Same idea, different scale. The technical shapes and the ethical arguments line up.
Do I have to pick a European provider?: You don't have to pick any provider at all for this specific folder. That's the whole point.

Take the island

Elba is one HTML file. It runs locally in a Chromium browser, seals a folder with AES-256-GCM, never phones home, and becomes open source on 1 January 2030.

€49MMXXVI· now ·
€39MMXXVII2027
€29MMXXVIII2028
€19MMXXIX2029
FreeMMXXX2030

the price falls each year · free to all 1 jan 2030

Take the island — €49

pay once · no account · nothing leaves