Your Digital Life, Under Your Control
Why Reality2 exists, how it works, and what digital sovereignty actually looks like.
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The Problem
Right now, you don't own your digital life. You think you do, but look closer.
Your photos live on someone else's server. Your messages pass through someone else's system. Your smart thermostat only works if the manufacturer's cloud is online. Your watch talks to your phone - but only through an app that reports back to a corporation. Every password you create is one more secret stored on someone else's computer, waiting to appear in the next data breach.
You've probably felt the friction: the password you can't remember, the two-factor code you're waiting for, the device that won't pair, the app that won't work offline, the service that shut down and took your data with it. These aren't minor inconveniences. They're symptoms of a digital world that was never designed to put you in control.
Reality2 is designed to change that.
What It Looks Like
These imagined situations show what Reality2 is designed to make possible. They describe the direction of the protocol, rather than features available in a current app.
You walk into a friend's house. Your phone and their speaker recognise each other from last visit. Music picks up where it left off. No app to open, no pairing screen, no login. They've met before, they trust each other, and they just work.
You're hiking and lose mobile signal. Your watch and your partner's phone keep sharing location and heart rate directly - because they trust each other and don't need a cell tower to prove it. When you get signal again, everything syncs quietly.
Your elderly mother's home sensors notice an unusual pattern. Her devices alert yours - not through a cloud service that stores her daily habits, but directly between your two trusted circles, sharing only what's relevant. No company is watching. Just family looking after family.
Notice what's absent. No login screen. No pairing dialog. No spinning wheel while a distant server decides what's allowed. The technology does its job and stays out of the way.
There's a term for this: calm technology. Technology that works quietly in the background, only stepping forward when it genuinely needs your attention. Reality2 is designed to be calm.
Trust That Works Like Trust
In real life, trust isn't a password. It builds through experience - you meet someone, interact over time, and gradually trust them more. Today's digital systems ignore all of this. Trust is binary: logged in or locked out.
Reality2 uses trust groups: devices sharing a cryptographic group identity, under the control of the people responsible for them. Enrolment establishes membership. Group membership and the authority to perform a sensitive action are separate questions.
The network learns from observation, but that learning does not grant membership. A familiar route can become unreliable; a group member can be asleep or out of range. Silence alone does not remove a member from its group.
There is no central account service that every group must depend on. Keys, device security and the authority to manage a group still matter.
When groups need to work together
Reality2 handles this through entanglement. Two trust groups open a secure channel - but stay separate. They agree on exactly what to share, in which direction, under what conditions. Either side can end it at any time.
An entanglement stands while its agreed conditions hold. Those conditions can concern proximity, duration or the task being performed. Each group evaluates them using its own evidence. A lost connection is not, by itself, proof of misconduct. A relationship between two groups does not automatically extend to a third.
A Network That Learns
Most networks are like fixed roads. When the road disappears, everything stops. Reality2 treats connectivity as something that comes and goes - because in the real world, it does.
Nearby devices can relay messages even when they belong to different groups. Each device uses local observations of neighbours and links to make forwarding decisions. An end-to-end receipt says something arrived; it does not prove the original route is still available. When no path exists, delivery must wait or fail according to the message and the resources available.
Privacy That's Structural
Relaying a frame does not grant access to its encrypted payload or authority to act on it. Authentication, encryption and permission serve different purposes: a valid integrity check establishes authenticity, while encryption is what protects the contents. Inter-group cooperation is governed by the scope of the relationship.
Reality2 is designed to let people control the devices and relationships that handle their data, without a mandatory central collector. Applications still need to make appropriate choices about what they store and share. The protocol provides boundaries; it cannot make every application private by itself.
How Is This Different?
Not locked to one brand. The protocol defines how conforming implementations cooperate, rather than requiring one manufacturer's ecosystem.
Not just a mesh network. Mesh networks move data but don't carry trust. Reality2 combines networking with cryptographic identity.
Not one-shot sharing. AirDrop is a single transaction. Reality2 relationships are ongoing - devices remember each other and cooperate continuously.
Nobody owns it. No Reality2 account. No Reality2 cloud. Trust groups are sovereign - the members control the group, period.
What This Means For You
Your health, on your terms. A watch, ring, and phone form a trust group, keeping your health data local. Share with a doctor through entanglement - scoped, revocable, no company in the middle.
Devices that work together. Different makers, one personal ecosystem - because they're all members of your trust group, not because a corporation brokered the deal.
The physical world, connected properly. Farms, buildings, vehicles full of sensors that work with limited power and intermittent connectivity. Cooperate locally, sync when paths appear.
Resilience when it counts. The design allows local cooperation without a central server. What remains reachable during an outage depends on the available devices, power and communication links.
Beyond People: the Living World
Digital sovereignty doesn't stop at people. A river catchment, a forest, a mountainside - these have guardians too: the communities who live alongside them and care for them. That guardianship shapes how Reality2 is built.
The same trust groups that keep your health data private can give a community real control over the data gathered about the natural world it looks after. Sensors in a river, on a bridge, across a hillside form a trust group of their own, and the community are its guardians - they decide what's measured, what's shared, and with whom. Insights can be offered to researchers through entanglement, on the community's terms, never harvested behind their backs.
This is the symbiosis at the heart of Reality2: distributed intelligence that works with people and the living world rather than extracting from either. And because the mesh runs over BLE, WiFi and LoRa with no cloud in the loop, it's designed to keep working off-grid - exactly when a flood takes out the cell towers and a community needs its sensors, and each other, most.
Explore the design
How devices carry messages, groups set boundaries, and applications cooperate.
How It Works Uses and Earlier Projects