No independent field evaluation of the decentralised stack for real UK communities

Claims about the usability of sovereignty-stack tools are almost entirely vendor-made. The honest status: Waku is pre-production, with a public testnet targeted for 2026 and mainnet in 2027, and unproven for ordinary community use; Matrix works and faces metadata-leakage and homeserver-burden critiques; Solid stalled; personal data store and mutual-credit pilots are rarely independently evaluated. No What Works-style body runs structured trials of these stacks with actual UK community organisations and publishes comparable results, so funders and councils cannot distinguish production-ready from aspirational, and money chases whitepapers.

Misallocated trust cuts both ways: communities adopt immature tools and get burned, or dismiss mature ones as crypto-adjacent hype. Sixty years of What Works methodology exists. Applying it here would discipline vendors, including the decentralised-web ecosystem itself, and de-risk adoption.

A funded civic stack test lab running structured field trials of sovereignty-stack tools with UK community organisations, publishing comparable evaluations, reference architectures and total-cost-of-ownership data.

// Build now: First artefact: comparative field evaluation with a first community-organisation cohort; philanthropically fundable, trials generate the data.

Vendor claims dominate and no What Works-style body independently trials these tools with real communities; the methodology exists and no deadline forces it.