I talk a lot about the sovereign web — the idea that the tools running our digital presence should be ones we understand, control, and can move away from if we ever need to. So it’s worth being upfront about a small contradiction I’ve just built into my own stack.
Signalforge is my new inbound communication system: a single channel that all of the sites now use for contact forms, spam filtering, and getting messages into my inbox reliably. Before Signalforge, contact forms across the OA websites were scattered, inconsistent, and dependent on whatever third-party form service happened to be bolted on at the time. Signalforge replaces all of that with one purpose-built pipeline that I designed and can own end to end.
It’s a small project by design. A widget on the front end, an API endpoint, a function that filters spam and stores every submission, and a notification sent straight to my personal inbox — no analytics trackers, no marketing platform, no third-party form vendor sitting between a visitor and me. I built it in an afternoon, and it’s designed to be improved over time as my own needs change.
Here’s the honest part: right now, Signalforge runs entirely on Amazon Web Services — API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and SES. That’s not the sovereign, self-hosted ideal I ultimately want to work toward. I chose it because it let me stand up something reliable and low-maintenance quickly, at effectively no cost for a small business’s traffic, without having to run and secure any additional servers on day one.
I’m not pretending that’s the finish line. Part of what the sovereign web means to me is being deliberate about dependencies, not eliminating them overnight — and being transparent when a tool I’ve built still leans on big-tech infrastructure. Signalforge is architected simply enough that its pieces — the API layer, the storage, and the notification logic — could each be swapped for a self-hosted or open-source equivalent later without touching the front-end widget. That’s the intent behind building it this way: not a permanent AWS commitment, but a working system today with an open door to something more independent tomorrow.
Small project, honest trade-offs, room to grow. That’s Signalforge.