// the take
A markdown-only awesome-list pairing mainstream services (Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) with privacy-respecting alternatives across search, messaging, email, OS, browsers and more. It's aimed at developers or privacy-conscious users looking for a jumping-off point of alternatives, not a tool or library.
Broad category coverage in one place (search, messengers, cloud storage, VPN, email, OS, browsers, maps) so you don't have to hunt across a dozen niche lists. Several entries link to the actual privacy policy or technical explanation (e.g. Signal Protocol, Tahoe-LAFS capability model) instead of just a marketing blurb. The 'Questionable' tier for things like Telegram and Keybase is a useful nuance most curated lists skip — it admits gray areas instead of binary good/bad.
No audit dates or recheck process: claims like 'no logs' for VPNs or 'E2E encrypted' for messengers are asserted once and never revisited, so you can't tell if they're still true. At least one listed alternative (Skiff) was shut down after being acquired by Notion, and it's still presented as a live option — a sign link/fact rot isn't being tracked. Several entries (Librengine, Chttr, Vector, Marshall, NullSec Linux) are small or seemingly inactive projects with no indication of maturity, maintainers, or whether they actually work, so you can't tell a viable alternative from an abandoned side project. Keybase appears in two different sections with inconsistent framing, which undercuts trust in the categorization itself.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →