Unplug America — the Canadian Alternatives Directory
Synopsis
A directory of Canadian alternatives to American consumer software and services, assembled after a run of Canadian app-deleting in late August 2026. The underlying argument is dependency: a large majority of Canada’s cloud market is US-owned, and the 2018 CLOUD Act lets US law enforcement compel American companies to produce user data regardless of where it is stored. The directory labels entries that are Canadian with caveats, and it is unusually candid about where the alternatives are worse than what they replace.
Where I land
I moved from the USA to Canada, so this sits downstream of a decision I already made. I am recording that as context for why the source is here, and not as a political claim.
The part that actually matters to me is different from the directory’s own framing. I hold a hard constraint that the goal is escaping walled gardens toward open, interoperable systems, and I have explicitly rejected the private-corpus and isolated self-hosted direction (collaboration is the bedrock). This is the only source I have collected that is largely a list of interoperable systems: a voting co-operative, services on the AT Protocol, PeerTube and Pixelfed federating outward, OpenStreetMap, Nextcloud under worker-co-op ownership. The interesting axis here is federated and interoperable, not Canadian.
One note to myself: Obsidian appears in the directory as Canadian. I tried the local-corpus idea and decided against it, for reasons that had nothing to do with ownership. That decision stands.
Connections
Related: The Agent Internet — Two Videos, One Premise