DI.DAY - Local Meetings for Digital Sovereignty
The infrastructure of our digital everyday life lies largely in the hands of a few large corporations. The Digital Independence Day responds to this with a pragmatic approach: local communities meet up every first Sunday each month to reduce individual big tech dependencies together.
Digital sovereignty is based on the infrastructure that shapes our everyday lives. Which services we use does not only influence our own communication and work patterns, but also reinforces or weakens the power dynamics of the entire digital ecosystem. Big Tech benefits from dependencies on their platforms, which are often less technical than psychological and social. This is where local, real-world initiatives intervene that do not merely name alternatives but make them practically accessible.
The Digital Independence Day is a joint project of several organisations, coordinated by Save Social - Networks For Democracy. On the first Sunday of every month, the DI.DAY reminds us that digital independence is not a one-off effort but an ongoing process. This regularity creates a rhythm: instead of one large and intimidating switch, the focus shifts to smaller, achievable steps. The perspective moves from abstract systemic critique toward everyday, workable action.
Find out more about the Digital Independence Day here!
Switching recipes are the central tool of this approach, collected at di.day/de/wechselrezepte. Each recipe describes a concrete migration — from Chrome to Firefox, from WhatsApp to Signal, from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap, or from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice — with an estimated time investment and difficulty level. The recipe metaphor is programmatic: it translates technical migration into a format everyone knows and defuses the sense of being overwhelmed. The range of recipes also makes clear that independence is not a binary state but a gradual relationship to the systems one uses. Anyone who starts by merely switching their search engine has already removed one data point from the analytical logic of large providers.
Switching Recipes can be found here!
MUCCC, the Chaos Computer Club München, also known as µC³ carries this idea on the ground. Regular meetings for the Digital Independence Day offer a low-threshold point of contact for anyone with questions, in need of setup support, or looking for exchange with others. What begins as an individual concern becomes a community in which technical knowledge is shared and the switch itself is made tangible in everyday life. Local nodes of this kind are essential if the idea is not to be reduced to digital reading material but to move into concrete practice.
