Stolen from @vmstan
More analysis from @wiredfire:
It’s nothing to do with [difficulties in using multiple platforms]. It’s to do with the massive backlash they got on Fedi for their CEO being all Trumpy and somewhat horrible right wing. So they’ve run away because they were made to feel unwelcome on account of us not letting their BS fly.
Original screenshot is of the bio of https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy and wasn’t a post (that confused me for a sec).
At least we know where their loyalties actually lie, now.
I suggest Mullvad as an alternative to Protons VPN services.
Yeah, plenty of good VPN alternatives. Not so much for email though if you want encryption.
I would not rely on provider-dependent encryption anyway. If you want actual encryption - use PGP.
Don’t use PGP.
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/
Also read “Why does Tuta Mail not use PGP?” here: https://tuta.com/encryption
tuta.com seems a good option, I switched to them a few months ago and so far so good
Yeah I was considering this service. There are a few things that make me hesitant, like searchability of emails and possibly calendar features and integration. But this one is definitely at the top of my list.
Searchability is good, better than Proton even. I’m sure it requires keeping all the emails stored locally but thats ok with me
Yeah I’ve seen people run into issues not finding some emails, but from what I researched, this seems like a really good service. Slowly moving my stuff back into my hands, so email is coming lol
Tuta is in Germany, part of the 14 Eyes, which share intelligence with the US. If you are an American engaged in activism under the current administration, do not use Tuta. They are absolutely obligated to comply with sealed warrants for your data, and nobody there is going to put their livelihood or freedom on the line for you, nor should they be expected to.
Good thing it’s encrypted then.
So is Proton. And Proton is in a country where it’s illegal to give data to the US government.
They don’t encrypt as many parts of emails as Tuta does, tho.
A point that’s largely moot, considering all of nothing is still nothing, which is what the US gets from Proton, while Germany will hand over whatever little information Tuta has when asked nicely.
Seconded.
For anyone considering switching though, make sure:
- You don’t need port forwarding (e.g. for faster P2P online gaming, or various other P2P services) since I don’t believe they have it, or if they do it certainly doesn’t work well
- You’re okay with a smaller selection of servers, since Mullvad has less
I will say though, I found less sites throttled/blocked me on Mullvad in some cases, since Mullvad’s IPs are less widely shared than Proton’s, so that’s a plus, but a few sites will have hard blocks on some VPN providers like Mullvad that they’ve made manual exclusions to for larger VPNs like Proton.
From what I understand, Mullvad removed port forwarding to clamp down on piracy.
iirc, they removed port forwarding because people were hosting CSAM and Mullvad lost some location/internet providers business.
This is good news. It means we aren’t monitizeable enough.
Besides slow responses to support request and handing over info on that
SwissFrench activist, is there anything else they’ve done wrong? And I understand that they had no choice in the Swiss case - they had to abide by the law there.What Swiss activist?
I wouldn’t even call this something they did wrong, it’s sad that they do have to do this, but okey
I agree. I support climate activists fully. Proton seemingly just obeyed the law in this case, though.
CEO came out in support of Trump and criticized Democrats.
If a business chooses to take a political position that isn’t strictly policy related they should expect blowback.
Honestly that’s just silly. Some random CEO enforcing Trump shouldn’t be the thing to break the camels back.
How is the CEO of the business that makes the product in question “random”? Regardless, supporting Trump in this day and age is support for all the very worst things. You’re way off base thinking it shouldn’t be influential, few things mean more these days.
I care about the product feature set and price. Other considerations include environmental and societal impact as well as company billing reputation.
We should stop treating CEOs like celebrities
vpns are all about trust. there is none if the literal chairman of the vpn company is an actual fascist. escaping these people is the reason many use vpns in the first place.
To add, it’s a CEO with a lot less power than a normal CEO because of the Porton Foundation that’s above it. Some countries (like Swiss) also have more rules and regulations in place to keep people to help consumers
He didn’t even endorse Trump, he agreed with one statement. (And doubled down on that and is really an idiot)
Yeah afaik their hands were tied with the Swiss incident. No VPN (or was it mail? it’s been a while, either way) is going to jail for a user.
Not to mention that the data they did actually provide was very minimal. They didn’t have to compromise any of their existing services to provide it.
There wasn’t exactly anything Proton could have done from a technical standpoint to prevent themselves from knowing what they did, without making the service itself nonfunctional.
I’m out of the loop- what happened? Recently people were promoting Proton as an alternative to Gmail and Microsoft.
Owner of proton is a huge MAGA Trumper because he “stands up for the little guys”.
I’m not on the exit proton bandwagon. All CEOs are awful and I don’t have the energy to do the vote-with-your-dollars ethical consumption dance every time we’re freshly reminded of that fact. Especially not with the only service out there that packages data integrity, privacy, and ease of use in a complete suite at the level that proton does.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say this a million times again, capitalism is simply not viable. The main mechanism to punish bad business practice (using a different business) also hurts the significantly weaker consumer; meaning it will almost never be used properly.
I point this out here because I agree with your stance and cannot stand the “vote with your wallet” nonsense people pretends works.
This makes it really difficult to navigate the privacy space because eventually a cornerstone like Proton is “corrupted” and we have no way to correct it. We seriously need people thinking about solutions to this problem, or we’ll be going nowhere fast.
If you might allow me to disagree with you slightly…
The key to this, as in many things, is balance; in ALL things. Voting with your wallet does work, its a form of influencing and controlling the direction of the capital. It just doesn’t work in a long term sense because people stop there; like boycotting. It is hard to boycott a company that has a monopoly on a market that has become a necessity, even if it’s only a necessity to a niche community.
The key is, that you spend on smaller businesses, that are closer to the consumer than at large conglomerates. If there is none for the market, create one and encourage people to support your business that doesn’t have any political ties yet. For example, I live in a capitol city, and my neighbor a few houses down has started a small chicken coop in their back yard; i began buying my eggs from them as its much cheaper and I don’t have to worry about my funds being reallocated in support of something that would harm me or my community as they are a part of my community. Also, I deliver pizza as a third job for a small, mom and pops place and encourage those political minded people to spend money there as the pizza is made with fresh ingredients and made there. Takes a bit longer but we are too small to allocate funds to political matters and organizations; we do small events for the schools in the community but that is about it.
Once said businesses start to grow too big, rinse and repeat. Find another small business and support them. As support dwindles from a company that is growing too large, their options become more and more limited.
This seems not to work due to peoples mindset and preferring convenience over meaningful spending; which is something that I know not how to combat. What say you, friends?
First off, I am happy that your community is functional and that (at least for now) the capitalist structure works for you.
The core of this issue lies in human-nature and incentive-structure. The thing is, majority of people never act as the ideal in any system. In fact most of the time, due to the often strict guidelines of systems, people act in bad faith. What this means is that any system, at all times, will have significant resistance to existing and will need sufficient guardrails to not fall apart. Why bring this up? Because capitalism has no guardrails.
The “start another business” argument is not viable because (unfortunately) most people do not have the capital nor expertise to compete. An extremely high number of people on Earth do not own businesses, and there is a reason for this.
The “rinse wash and repeat” argument also quickly falls apart because:
- The very very small population that has capital and expertise shrinks every time we do this
- The new businesses born are not likely to survive (based on startup failure rates)
- The more businesses, the harder it is to compete
A significant amount of industries around the world are effective monopolies, there is a reason for this. Low capital pool, low talent pool, high failure rates, and high competition - means that once you make it out of development hell, you are almost always unrivaled and can easily destroy/outlast your competitors.
Since we’re here, lets talk about incentive structure. Most people do not have disposable income, those that do are investors. In a system where money is the “goal”, the natural result is that the investors will be prioritized. This generally means that the end-user (me and you) are being exploited. Mom and Pop will not save you from the physics of money.
The only thing I’ve seen “work” is when there is a community of strong moral fiber that refuses to sell out their neighbor. This is why I said I am happy for you, because this is extremely rare.
As for the solution, any answer I give will be bad. This is a complex (not complicated!) issue and requires influential, smart, and rich people to work towards a goal for many years.
That said, I am giving a bad answer anyway. We need a way to “miniaturize” infrastructure, with the end goal being distributed (decentralized) infrastructure. The reason being that we need to decouple the government and monopolies from the market. This is obviously extremely difficult to do, but I think it can be done. We actually have a lot of the tools for this (3d printers, foss, internet, etc) but the direction, knowledge, and polish aren’t there.
Proton is a bandage solution to email being hijacked by Google and Microsoft - they used their infrastructure to turn an open protocol (email) into a closed implementation (you cant send email to your buddy without gmail). Proton is a middle ground where they respect us, but are also “in the club”. We wouldn’t need them if emails could simply be sent from my router to your router (tor has something like this).
I’m not too sure it’s as difficult as you are making it out to be. We see something similar with “black wall street” where black communities were committed to keeping their capital within their communities and black owned companies. We can even see this with the Amish and how they have survived as a community. I’m not completely sure if you can keep 100% of the capital within certain communities; but in a similar sense, we can at least attempt to be more meaningful with how and where we spend our money. The tech community chooses which company they support and do “business” with, similarly with fashion and many other things that aren’t completely necessary. I feel like that would at least be a start. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will correcting the public’s spending habits. But it has been done and can be done again. There just needs to be the right incentive; to which, I’m not sure what that would be.
I agree with you, and yeah the convenience factor is in fact a huge problem and is highly exploited. The only thing I saw working are in fact laws to make the switch to another “service” more convenient (e.g. you have a messaging app? your protocol must be open source so that other clients should be possible by law, idk how feasible is this, but u get the idea).
Techies interested in privacy and fairness is just another target/focus group to be marketed to…
But even given that every company sucks(eventually) and every ceo is an asshole. there’s something to be said about about spreading out and e.g. using proton over gmail and other google services.they might both suck, but at least if it’s spread out, there’s not one asshole ceo that controls all our stuff at once. You can’t vote with your wallet, but preventing monopolies (the natural end game of a free market) by supporting smaller alternatives can still be worthwile. Not that it solves the underlying issues, but i think it can at least slow the decay a bit.
Yup. If there was an encrypted, federated solution that provided all of the services that proton does, even if half as polished, I’d absolutely consider switching. I’d even consider running my own node. All centralized solutions that see success also become over time the thing you want to flee.
It’s to do with the massive backlash they got on Fedi
That makes no sense, considering the message in question was posted on Xitter, and the backlash they received was far worse and more public on Reddit, where they are directing their followers to go. It won’t stop anyone from talking about them here.
The message was on Xitter from Andy Yen, but it was highlight on Mastodon by Jonah from Privacyguides.
The official Proton account also tried to defend Andy Yen on Mastodon (and later deleted it).Here the link to the thread on Mastodon.
it was highlight on Mastodon by Jonah from Privacyguides.
Leaving Mastodon doesn’t make Jonah disappear.
The official Proton account also tried to defend Andy Yen on Mastodon
They also tried to defend him on Reddit. Again, it makes no sense.
which they have full control over
And yet it remains.
which got removed by a Proton fan
They have the ability to moderate their own comments on any platform.
Your account history is public
Do you think there’s nothing that archives the content from Reddit? How do you think they knew it was removed?
The corporation doesn’t have to stifle 100% of their criticism, they just need to disseminate enough of a counternarrative, with PR statements that are technically true enough, to overpower the criticism so that it no longer matters.
(Plus, based on your last comment, I know you already have a “they can moderate anything they feel like” response lined up, if they do start clamping down even harder where they can.)
What’s Xitter?
Portmanteau of X (current name) and Twitter (former name)
And shit, don’t forget the shit
It’s like Twitter but Xitty (pronounced like Xi Jinping).
Making quite a few ungrounded assumptions here. Maybe your platform is just shit?
Are those people who have been quoted supposed to be significant to the privacy community?
I’ve looked through the links provided and read a couple articles (one is titled “Does Proton really support Trump? A deeper analysis and surprising findings” and it is all very he said/she said with almost nothing to back anything or anyone up…
I’ll gladly read more if anyone has info?
It’s pretty simple, really. Did you read the original statement? Did you see where Yen said the Republican Party will champion the little people and be great for privacy? End of discussion.
The squabbling over “hE dIdN’t diRecTly prAIse Trump” is nonsense whataboutism distraction.
It’s pretty simple, really.
Context matters. Even if you don’t see it.
No, as far as I am aware these are simply people that got significant traction on Mastodon today. Michael Stanclift is a contributor to Mastodon. This post is more me curating popular sentiment than expert opinion, though I recognize both are important.
The most significant quote is from Proton itself, which made an official statement in favor of Republican and JD Vance.
I haven’t seen many people simply post archives to the now-deleted contents of what Proton said, which is pretty damning in its own right. Before Proton realized their mistake, started erasing their original replies, and crafting a much less damning-looking narrative.
I’ve reviewed the article that tries to ascertain Andy Yen’s politics (as if doing this would have been less weird if it was unabashed love of Democrats) and I agree it’s pretty bad in several ways.
Fsck em and feed em fish heads
Not surprising. Proton and their volunteer mods on /r/protonmail quash talk that doesn’t make them look good. Plus there are a bunch of fanboys willing to defend whatever Proton does.
It’s still one of the best services out there for people engaging in activities the US government disapproves of. Mullvad and Tuta are located in countries that work together with US intelligence as part of the 14 Eyes, and Sweden is also working on legislation to require backdoors into encrypted messaging. If you must use something other than Proton VPN out of some ideological bent, then Njalla or cryptostorm are the better VPN choices.
cryptostorm is a fast VPN that requires no account or other information, and access can be bought from resellers using crypto, making it impossible for cryptostorm to identify you out of all the people using their service, let alone turn over your data. I’ve used this VPN, and it was fast enough to play multiplayer shooters online.
Njalla is an infamous bullet-proof VPN and web host, that hosts several high profile piracy sites out of Costa Rica. They do not comply with demands for information or to take down services. It’s a top choice for people who plan on sailing the high seas.
Both of these services allow port forwarding, something Mullvad does not due to piracy.
Yikes, to using an outrage bait twitter post as the OP.
Also, to the lazy ‘they’re fascist’ criticism based on exactly no facts
This opinion article goes into the situation a bit more
I know the situation. There’s more nuance to it than simply ‘Proton is fascist’. Posts like the OP do not contribute to people understanding the situation, it is simply promoting misinformation, outrage bait and drama.
The actual piece of information here is ‘Proton stops using Mastodon’. That information may be tangentially related to this discussion group, but isn’t exactly a noteworthy piece of information that inspires much discussion. Instead, OP is using it as a means of posting outrage bait. The pictured comment that implies that Proton left Mastodon because Mastodon wasn’t fascist enough.
This is simply bullshit misinformation meant to inspire outrage that’s duck taped to a news item so it can be posted here. This kind of crap isn’t about Privacy, it’s a way for people to sneak misinformation into the community by dressing it up as a piece of news.
e: Here’s an example of a privacy community where they simply posted about the event without any of the extra misinformation, notice how the discussion is less extreme and is focused on the actual thing that happened instead of reacting to the outrageous framing: https://lemmy.world/post/26094433
Oh do tell me more about how trump and musk aren’t fascists!
So, you’re so high on outrage that you can’t even understand the context of a comment.
From the OP:
apparently we aren’t Fash enough for @protonprivacy
Is there literally a single shred of evidence that they stopped posting on Mastodon because it wasn’t fascist enough for them.
For the outrage junkies, *them* refers to @protonprivacy and not whatever *them* you want to insert to make outrage farming quips.So, do tell me how you’re so confident that proton left Mastodon because it wasn’t fascist enough.
You can’t, because it’s a nonsense fact-free accusation. This kind of ignorance, where reality isn’t as important as spinning a situation to “own the other side”, is how we got the MAGA movement.
Rather than engaging in reality you’re contributing to the spread of bullshit because it’s bullshit that you personally enjoy.
Do better.
Maybe @protonprivacy can post on Mastodon to rebut OP
You’re not required to rebut baseless allegations made by faceless people on the Internet.
You are here doing it so I guess we will never know. Time to move on.
Nobody thinks that they chose Twitter FOR the fascism but they’re absolutely siding with the fascists. Elon Musk makes money off their presence on X.com, end of story.
Crazy how Lemmy went nuts at the thought of anyone staying on Twitter but are tripping over themselves to defend the Proton guy.
The CEO agreed with one statement from Trump (which is often misquated as well) and doubled down on it and is generally an idiot.
But that doesn’t mean they support Trump (or Musk). I know the US politics has been changing and removing the ability to look for compromises, but in the rest of the democtatic world agreeing with one statement from a person or party doesn’t mean you agree with their entire political agenda.
Only use Proton with your own domain so you can switch, but there aren’t that many other good options and none of them offer the same protection the Swiss law does.
A “privacy-focused” company is choosing to stop using the open source social media site in favor of one run by a guy who gives Nazi salutes. There’s no positive spin to it.
Protons biggest blunder of being able to pass it off as the opinions of one CEO was doubling down and going further into their thoughts on US politics from their Proton reddit account. Then editing and deleting comments when their attempts at damage control failed.
That’s the most interesting thing about all this. That they felt compelled enough to speak on it and then just dug themselves in further. And that’s their attempt at a palatable mainstream explanation. So it is intriguing wondering about what they actually believe.
At this point they’d be better off saying we don’t know anything about US politics we were out of our depth and trying to market ourselves to Americans saying things that we believed made us sound good. But in the end we are Switzerland based company not a US one.
I have seen that comment as well and yeah they dug themselves further. They where an idiot for doing that if they are trying to stay impartial, heck they are idiot for going into into it in the first place. Pretty sure they just have a terrible communications department.
However, most of the world sees politics differently than the two-party system the US has and it is almost never so toxic as it is with the US. Just because you agree with one statement doesn’t mean you agree with all statements of the specific person/party. I feel like a lot of people in the US are forgetting that.
Rest of the world sees the US as a country that is getting closer to the Russians and alienating their former allies like Canada, Mexico, UK, and EU. So make of it what you will when it comes to whether endorsement of the US would be seen positively in other international markets Proton is trying to reach. There’s a growing blanket dislike of the US with no care for parties.
Protons best move is stopping with US centric topics which looking at their socials has been their main marketing focus. Focus on the fact that they are Switzerland instead of so desperately attaching themselves to the US in a world that is seeing more anti US sentiment grow. Which after their blunder with their CEO is not going to run well at all anyways being perceived as disingenuous by critics.
Let memory of US fade when it comes to Proton. That’s what I’d recommend to their marketing team.
Also got curious and looked more into Andy Yen, and he did schooling in the US going to Caltech and Harvard. It seems when it comes to Switzerland it was chosen as a place to start Proton, so unsure if he had ties to the country before hand. So I don’t think the whole he is some foreigner who is completely clueless about American politics can be used as an excuse, and certainly explains the very US centric approach of the company’s marketing. Background would suggests this is someone at the very least well aware of American politics and spent a significant time there immersed in the culture.
oddly satisfying upvote ratio
Proton is going boots up.
Proving that a company is not a person. A person goes tits up when the boots go up.
You’d think Fedi would be a good place to be active on from a privacy-conscious user-base perspective, but I think this is the second time they leave Fedi? Either way, I guess being on Reddit allows them to moderate all the naysayers away.
deleted by creator
It’s engaging, though.
If it draws eyeballs, Reddit admins are happy with it, long term health be damned. That’s someone else’s problem, once they exit with a truck of cash.
I made this basic comment about the CEO saying something pro-Trump and my comment got removed by a mod of /r/degoogle on the grounds that it wasn’t factual.
Pretty infuriating.
/r/degoogle is total bullshit. That sub routinely and consistently shits on any non-google suggestion, for all sorts of bogus reasons. It’s like the sub exists to trick people into thinking google is impossible to avoid, rather than just supporting steps away from google.
There are a lot of advantages to the fediverse, but privacy really isn’t one of them.
Nobody thinks it is, but privacy-interested peope are more likely to congregate on an open and decentralized playform not controlled by the privacy-invading corpo megaghouls
Can’t have privacy for your speech if you don’t have the freedom to speak in the first place.
Maybr not exactly privacy, but as long as your instance admins doesn’t leak you IP, you have much more privacy than on Reddit. There are no algorithms trying to show you relevent ads, because your account isn’t tied to your identity (unless your instance admin is evil).
Also, most Lemmy instances allows Tor. Yay for anonymity.
For me, the main advantage of the model is “you cannot conveniently observe everyone’s activity from one place”.
At face value this is true, but I challenge you to consider the knock-on effects of having a decentralized platform. One of which being that it become increasingly difficult to coerce someone into giving PII (i.e phone number) to signup - they’ll just go elsewhere
This effectively makes it more private for everyone.
True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won’t be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.
With ActivityPub specifically, I’m aware. Yet privacy-conscious people tend to congregate there as well, which was my point.
Proton is dead
Any alternatives?
gmail
(this is a joke dont hunt me down pls)
Hotmail is better. The authentication process and the junk filter is soooooo cool.
nahhh yahoo mail is objectively the best one
I found this site useful. The list of alternatives is very large.
From my looking around at other info and advice, I’d say that Posteo is the best one if you don’t have custom domains; and that mailbox.org or possibly Tuta mail is best if do need a custom domain. Tuta is probably best if you need it to be free.
Another solid option not on that list is fastmail.fm (which is Australian).
Does anyone know if Tuta has an alias email feature?
deleted by creator
fuck proton. finally started moving to it from gmail like a month ago. then the ceo thing happened, now this. good thing i only changed email to a few places so i can immediately steer away…
