Project Nomad (github) - An offgrid survival archive with maps, wikipedia, AI models, and other resources that can be installed on any computer (home server, raspberry pi, etc).
Internet Archive - Archives of books, games, and any other media.
Open Slum (alternate) - Variety of book archives
Library Genesis (alt 1) (alt 2) (alt 3) – Download almost any book (including textbooks) ever.
Project Gutenberg - An archive of public domain books
Mwmbl - Peer to peer crawling, but centralized indexing, open-source, non-profit
YaCy - Fully peer to peer, open-source, non-profit, but requires running a local client to serve the webpage and there is no mobile app (the client could be hosted and provided through a domain, none found thus far)
Ecosia - The ads go towards environmental charity. “Not for profit” but not “non-profit”
Duck Duck Go - Privately Owned (for-profit with ads) but privacy focused.
Brave Search - Privately Owned (for-profit with ads) but privacy focused.
Briar – Peer to peer messaging that creates meshgrids with whatever communication medium is available. For example, if cell reception is unavailable, nearby Briar users can communicate over bluetooth chains. If any users on the mesh grid have internet connection, messages can then be routed to the internet (via Tor protocol).
Meshtastic - Peer-to-peer messaging that creates long-range mesh networks using radio hardware. When cell reception is unavailable, nearby Meshtastic nodes automatically relay messages across chains of inexpensive radios, achieving ranges of 1-20+ kilometers per hop. Phones connect to these radios via Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/USB, but the mesh itself operates on LoRa—two users cannot communicate phone-to-phone without the hardware. If any node on the mesh has internet connection, messages can bridge to the wider network (via MQTT protocol).
Bitchat - Works similarly to Briar but uses a geohash system to connect people near each other. Unlike Briar which requires making an account, Bitchat is “psuedoanonymous” (but does reveal your location). It also uses low power bluetooth instead of full WiFi+bluetooth.
Stoat – Open-source, privacy focused alternative to Discord (allows self-hosting). Developers plan to implement end to end encryption in the future.
Signal - Open-source, non-profit privacy focused chat client similar to GroupMe (E2E Encrypted)
Matrix - Open-source, non-profit privacy focused chat client similar to GroupMe (E2E Encrypted)
Proton - Open source, non-profit, privacy focused email
TempMail - Temporary email client for burner emails
LibreOffice - Open-source (MPL v2.0), non-profit (successor to OpenOffice)
CryptPad - End to End Encrypted, Open-source, non-profit, collaborative web editor based on OpenOffice
Proton - End to End Encrypted, Open-source, non-profit
Radicle - Open-source, peer to peer git repository platform
CodeBerg - non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting
A Virtual Private Network is a server that you route your network traffic through as a layer of protection. It is not as anonymous as the Tor network but adds a small amount of privacy while having faster connection speeds. The most common use is to mask your location. For example, If a website is blocking content for users in your region or if you want to stream content in a particular language you can use a VPN to make it seem as if you are connecting from somewhere else. VPNs generally cost money, but there are plenty of free ones out there.
Proton VPN – Proton Foundataion (privacy focused non-profit) operated; offers a free option
Nord VPN – Very common paid VPN
Orbot - A mobile app that
allows you to use the Tor network like a VPN (all internet traffic
routed through Tor)
The fediverse is a decentralized social media community. A collection of different platforms that communicate through open protocols like ActivityPub (the most common and standard protocol). ActivityPub allows a platform to communicate and share posts with any other platform using ActivityPub. Generally, fediverse platforms are open source and non-profit.
There is no central server as you would see on something like Youtube or Instagram. Instead, anyone can create an “instance” and allow people to make accounts on their instance (there are many public instances that you can join, you do not need to make your own instance). If you start your own Mastodon instance, it will be able to share content feeds coming from all other Mastodon instances. There are different platforms on the fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube, etc), these effectively just show the content in different formats but they can all intercommunicate. The critical advantage is that it makes censorship from centralized entities like Meta, Google, or the state more difficult to accomplish. It also helps prevent content control from being abused for purposes like propaganda.
You even have the ability to follow and interact with posts from other platforms. For example, you can follow a Lemmy or Peertube account with your Mastodon account. If you want to follow username123, who is a user on lemmy.world, simply go to your search bar and type “username123@lemmy.world” on any federated platform and it should pull up.
Platforms:
Here is a list of platforms which have similar functions to popular platforms.
There are many other platforms (see wiki), but these are generally the most popular.
FedDB - A database of fediverse platforms
Reddit → Lemmy
Twitter/X → Mastodon
Youtube → Peertube
Instagram → Pixelfed
Tiktok → Loops
Facebook → Friendica
Discord → Discourse
Spotify/Pandora/Youtube Music → Funkwhale
Note: Bluesky and Threads are technically federated.
Bluesky uses a different protocol (AT Protocol). Threads is generally
considered by the community to be excluded due to being owned by
Meta.
The deep web is the part of the internet which cannot/is not indexed by traditional search engines. In practice, the deep web refers to the part of the internet which uses the onion protocol (Tor) to create an anonymous multi-layer encrypted network. The onion protocol/Tor was created by US Intelligence in order to protect it’s own communications. If the protocol was only used by them, it would be obvious that the communications originated from them. In order to make the system truly anonymous they released Tor to the public so that their own traffic is buried. The entire framework is open-source and completely legal to use.
Technically “deep web” would also refer to any page on a web server that is inaccessible through a search engine (for example your account settings), however, that is not the common usage. The word “hidden web” is sometimes used to be more specific. The Darkweb is often refered interchangably, but the dark web is specifically the parts of the deep web where illegal/immoral activity takes place (of which there is an unfathomable amount). Traffic through the Tor network is nearly impossible to trace, thus all varieties of activities take place there.
When using the Tor network, your Internet Service Provider (ISP), government, or any other party cannot track your activity. However, if someone has direct access to your computer (for example on a work comptuter where admins can directly access), they will be able to look at information such as your cache files stored on the machine. Additionally, groups such as your ISP will be able to see that you are communicating through the Tor network (because you are connected to an entry node), but they will not be able to see the encrypted activity.
Tor services are accessed through .onion links, however, you can also access the regular internet through Tor. The .onion links are only necessary to anonymize the server you are connecting to for their protection. You cannot connect to a .onion link without using the tor network. If you are connecting to a normal internet service it will still anonymize you.
Tor - The main web browser used to access the Tor network.
Orbot - A mobile app that allows you to use the Tor network like a VPN (all internet traffic routed through Tor)
Ahmni - A tor network search engine (ironic given the definition above). The quality of results is often not great. Note that you will want to click the .onion link given on the page to access the real site.
Hidden Wiki – A directory of .onion sites and services.
Note on legality: It is advised not use the illegal sites and services that can be accessed here. Not only because it is often immoral, but because many are likely police “honey traps”. However, there are many useful resources such as forums, educational resources, communication services, etc. Using the Tor network is not illegal. It is used for privacy, anti-censorship, and all sorts of other legal applications. The hidden web is a neutral technology, it is up to you to decide how to use it.
Torrenting is a form of Peer to Peer filesharing where swarms of “seeders” are used to distribute files instead of a centralized server. The most common use of torrenting in common discourse is in relation to piracy, however, torrenting is used all over the place for distributing files. To distribute a file, a magnet link is provided which can be entered into a torrent client such as bittorrent, limewire, or a debrid service. The file is then downloaded from the swarm. After the file is downloaded, the torrent client will become a seeder and become one of the uploaders for that file. It is commonly believed that this is a requirement and the “seed will be stuck on your computer”. This is not true, if you do not wish to be a seeder you can simply delete the seed. This is frowned upon by the community but a common practice. If you can spare the resources it’s best to help build the swarm.
A debrid service allows you to participate in torrenting without seeding your computer or mooching. Instead, you pay a debrid provider a fee and they act as a cache server giving you the file and becoming a seeder for you. This is often used to bypass anti-piracy laws. This is because anti-piracy legislation generally targets uploaders, not downloaders. It is very rare (if happens at all) that a downloader is prosecuted for piracy. Once a large swarm is established, it also becomes financially infeasible to track each uploader. Corporations generally focus on serving cease and desists to the very large uploaders that they are able to track (which itself can be difficult). Debrid services avoid breaking the law by operating their servers in countries with lenient anti-piracy laws. When you purchase a debrid service you are simply purchasing a cache server to store your files in.
Torrent Clients
BitTorrent - The original bittorrent client, which created the bittorrent protocol.
qBittorrent – Torrent client written with Qt
μTorrent – Generic torrent client
Limewire - Generic torrent client (old school internet meme)
Debrid Services
Real-Debrid, EasyDebrid, AllDebrid, TorBox, Premiumize, ParadiseCloud, Debrid-Link, Offcloud, Put.io
Useful Tools/Services
Torrentio Guide – Guide for how to setup a debrid based streaming service that is higher quality than any traditional streaming service.
Public Domain Torrents – A directory of torrents to preserve public domain content
Linux Tracker - A directory for Linux torrents.
ThePirateBay
- A directory for magnet links for lots of different content/media.
Allows for copyrighted material, use at your own risk.
Ollama - Tool to run pre-trained LLMs locally. Usually interacted through a terminal or through a programming language like python. Open-source (MIT License), but for-profit
AnythingLLM - Desktop app for interacting with LLMs. Open-source (MIT License)
PocketPal – Mobile app for interacting with offline LLMs. Open-source (MIT License)
HuggingFace - Hub for all flavors of trained ANN models. Integrates with Ollama/python well.
Lumo - Model provided by the proton foundation (non-profit), privacy focused
Kimi – Online AI agent/chat model that has superior quality to chatGPT. The company is based in China. The model is open source and can be used offline.
Deepseek - Offers an alternative to chatGPT with equivalent quality results. The company is based in
China. There are offline models available as well as the online larger parameter model.
Hyphanet - Formerly freenet, a decentralized peer to peer alternative to the World Wide Web
Communist Internet Federation (CIF) – A group dedicated to creating privacy focused, non-profit services.
Adblock Plus - Adblocker extension
Wayback Machine - An archive of the history of any website.