It depends how they are doing it.

People learned years ago that there is a big difference between microblogs (twitter), blogs (facebook and tumblr), and message boards (reddit). And there are major differences even within those. The post you make for tumblr and the post you make for facebook are targeting very different audiences. Which IS time consuming for a good community manager and is shitty 100 character blog posts for someone’s nephew.

From checking out their bluesky, it looks like proton is pulling out of all the microblogs in favor of just reddit (bsky.app/profile/proton.me). Which sucks but is “fine”. And it is likely more that positive engagement on Mastodon was just too low to even be worth multi-posting once every two weeks. Which… is something a lot of not shitty companies have decided to be the case.

That said: I didn’t check twitter because fuck that shit. If they are still super active there then, yeah, ridiculously “sus”.

I’ll take a guess that they are going back to Reddit so they can control what gets posted and shown to others. They got railed on Mastodon following the drama, which is probably why they’re leaving.

Agreeing with one statement doesn’t mean you side with all the points of a person/party.

Andy Yen is an idiot though, not going to lie about that one

Do you have any recommendations for someone who just uses them for email?

Does Proton really support Trump? A deeper analysis

One thing to note is that while on Reddit, people are alleging that Proton is a company run by a fascist, pro-MAGA, pro-dictatorship CEO, users on X are accusing Andy and the company of being anti-MAGA/anti-Trump.

So, in the face of all the evidence I’ve found, to compare Andy to a tech oligarch like Zuck and Elon, who are now bootlicking on display for all to see, is not supported by the evidence.

[…]

However, being disillusioned with one party on one issue doesn’t mean that all of a sudden Andy Yen changed all of his stances and that now he’s actually pro-Republican or pro-MAGA. All of the evidence gathered suggests the exact opposite.

Considering how many users here have expressed similar disillusionment with the current Democratic party, it seems a bit hypocritical to judge Andy Yen for having the same feelings (or expressing them on occasion).

This whole “Proton supports MAGA” thing is another example of internet mob-think where everybody has an opinion informed by no facts at all, actively ignores or dismisses the larger context in order to protect that fragile opinion from reality, and most haven’t even looked at the original statements that sparked the controversy.

Just did the transition off Proton! Most replacement self hosted in my homelab except for email.

There is not and never was any endorsement of Trump. I wish people would stop spreading such wild disinformation.

He also never backpedaled.

Any alternatives for their VPN service with port forwarding?

Idc if I likes Trump or not (even though Trump is garbage); but I do care that he says the Republicans - the party that has spent years attacking encryption and privacy, who has sued to obtain private medical records of women and trans people who see doctors, and who is funded by billionaire big tech moguls - is the better option for privacy.

Also just taking ANY position for a leader of the US - one of the biggest parties to the Five Eyes agreement - just leaves a bad taste.

It’s a sad day when “you can find us over on Discord” is a better option.

There’s not much point in “post and ghosting” to platform if you’re not going to engage with its’ users. You might as well just direct people to your blog instead.

No. They’re a non profit with a specific mission to further the enhancement of provacy. Under Swiss law they’re legally obligated to adhere to this. Which means they can’t collect user data willy nilly and sell it.

Also, it wouldn’t make sense for a non-profit organization to profit from selling user data.

Proton’s revenue comes from paid subscriptions.

Unless you use a custom domain. That way you only need to update everything once.

Red flag… Do they tools to migrate ?

And I’d have thought the potential customers segment are exactly the Mastodon users.

Yea this is worse. The politics thing could be brushed off as Andy Yen being uneducated on American politics. Moving away from an already established fediverse platform is contradictory to Proton’s mission. It doesn’t take more than a minute to copy paste their xitter posts to Mastadon.

They have tools that let you cross-post effortlessly, so that’s strange.

I think the reason is that every time they post something, someone there points out the Andy Yen thing. Thats basically the only comments. So its detrimental to their business.

(Re)Posting and not engaging with the community is not free publicity, is bad publicity. They don’t have the resources (according to them) do to the latter, and therefore they choose not to do the former.

If you aren’t the customer, you are for sure the product. Even then, sometimes you are both.

Nothing good is free.

I’ve been pretty happy with PIA.

I’m searching for a safe and cheap alternative for my own domain, but it’s hard! And I don’t want to give money to American companies.

Reddit has a ton of users. Mastodon is marginal.

We have to wait and see what the next audit is going to find, that will give us more security than any kind of information provided from Proton themselves.

The Swiss laws are also helping to make it so they keep the privacy standards high.

But I would definitely use your own domain for your Proton mail currently

That word has truly lost all meaning.

I use Bitwarden coming from LastPass. It’s great for me and my fam.

Wow, that’s so many different services to splinter one Proton account into. I was thinking about it too, but that sounds exhausting.

Everyone recommends Tuta in these threads.

I just (finally) had a look at their pricing. Seems egregiously expensive? 6EUR / user / month for their cheapest business plan is a bit nuts

I just set up a paid account on Tuta today replacing my paid Proton account.

Use Disroot

We really need another Swiss alrernative

A human being.

i disagree as there are plenty of tools to post to multiple platforms at once. but yea if they were so kind to actually interact then yes

ability to silence, and censor or criticism,?-proton probably

I’m not, they are a bunch of researchers having their servers in the country with the most privacy protective laws in the world.

Sure, criticise them when they do bad things, but what do you propose, google mail (etc.)?

If you don’t have some real information you are just following a gut feeling (which by the way is the simplest to manipulate) and I think that is kind of curious actually.

I like Proton, I have their email & VPN, works like a charm, and their servers are in nuke safe bunkers in the swiss mountains.

The only other company that I have seen that isn’t shady like for sure seems to be Mullvad, I mean if you hate the swiss or something or prefer the swedes …

Something has always felt off. Swiss security is always a red flag, and free is never truly free. Don’t really know who you can trust at this point. Everything seems to turn to shit as some point or another.

Edit: I understand they get funding elsewhere and it subsidizes the free VPN, the free VPN also brings in customers. I thought that was obvious enough not to mention.

like i was following a bunch yotubers one time, and i heard over the pandemic they fled to facebook, because they were crying the sub was making them look bad, they are on facebook specifically so they can do what reddit mods can do, ban people, block them from thier discussions, delete criticism comments.( they had thier followers, and the employees systemically attack one of subs about them and taken it down, the current one they couldnt do it, so now they are trolling it). proton is probably going to astroturf thier sub.

fleeing to reddit of all place, banning any instance of discourse, much like facebook is now.

Out of curiosity, where did you move from Proton?

*member of the board

I do think the second part of your statement was unnecessary.

on reddit they can pursue sitewide bans more easily on users, since reddit had started doing this month. its to silence all criticism against them, im betting facebook will be thier next stop.

one simple reporting of your acct will get you immediately banned from the sub, and potentially a sitewide ban.

@mok0 @flamingos Thanks for recommending us! We have no plans to leave Mastodon :)

Exactly. If they need help maybe someone could create something so they can post to BlueSky, Matrix, Lemmy, and Mastadon at same time soon. Also set it up for the up and coming Flashes and Pixelfed.

They specifically said they don’t want to do automated posting, to avoid writing and not interacting with the community. I see no value in them doing this, considering we can get the same content via RSS, blog page or email newsletter. Presence makes sense if it means presence. If it means a bot reposting content, anybody can do it, but the value is very low.

i heard they stopped posting on bluesky weeks ago, not surprised they are active on meta platforms, and X.

Wait, you bought/gave money to Proton so early in its life? Why do people keep falling for these over and over.

If a ‘can run on low resources sustainably’ is legit, going to have test and wait for it to see first.

Otherwise we need to accept what we can and can’t have based on what is possible without being greedy and at someone else’s expense.

I suggest you give a read to “Privacy is power” by Carissa Veliz (on the board). She also gave a very good interview on the podcast “firewalls don’t stop dragons”.

I also don’t think “cryptonerds” applies to people like Tim Berners Lee.

I mean yeah I think the main problem is just Google having all that data about you and potentially selling it to others whether that be for advertising, robocalling, or other things. So it really just comes down to how comfortable you are allowing Google to be able to use your emails and communications from corporations to see what things you like. Only time it really matters more is if you are using email for more personal or secure communications which yeah I would always prefer using better encrypted more messaging focused apps like signal for or just talking in person when possible.

I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever.

As a privacy enthusiast (expert seems too much), this immediately stood out. Privacy is the context of emails means that all my data which includes the content of the messages but also the metadata (who I talk to, which services I use - like in your example -, when I communicate, how often, etc.) is kept private, meaning not used for anything else than providing me the service (i.e., let me send and receive emails). From this point of view, even if you consider the content of your emails not sensitive, already the fact that you do use company X (because they sent you a password reset email) is data about you, and as such can and will be mined by Google to profile you or to sell it.

Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?

Nobody can tell you this, because risk in this context is purely a subjective estimation, and you are free to do what you please. However, I do care about my privacy, which means that I want to minimize the amount of data about me available for sale or to others in general. For me the motivation is quite simple, while I do block ads everywhere too and I generally don’t have an impact in terms of getting personalized ads, once the data is collected I have no idea what will be used for, by whom and for what purpose. It doesn’t even matter if the data actually allows to infer accurate things about me, it’s enough that someone (e.g., insurance company, employer, bank, government, etc.) is gullible enough to believe that inference is correct. In the book “Privacy is power” (written by Carissa Veliz) she also develops a very interesting argument about the fact that violating your privacy usually means also violating the privacy of the people near you (the people with whom you share demographic, the people you communicate with etc.). This could be another point of view to consider.

Anyway, if for you the above is fine, there is no other significant risk you are taking, and you should keep using Gmail if that suits you.

A technical note. Secure email providers generally can have technical controls (i.e., encryption) to protect the body (content) of the email, and in some cases some small amount of metadata (e.g., Tuta encrypts also the subject). Generally though, you are still trusting the provider to perform that encryption (especially because a mail from Gmail -> Proton/Tuta would be encrypted by Proton/Tuta) and to not use metadata for any purpose besides delivering the emails. So privacy here doesn’t mean absolutely removing the data from a third party, but it means giving it to a third party who uses it (due to contractual obligation, business incentives etc.) only for the intended purpose in a privacy-preserving way.

FYI i use a degoogled FP3 with microG and I don’t have any problem.

kinda wierd for proton to promote on reddit, when reddit doesnt allow VPN usage to most users, mostly for spam/botting/ban evasions.