Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton’s trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.
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Looks like I’m leaving Proton. Fucking hell, not even a year ago I migrated from Gmail
Learn your lesson and switch to a custom domain :) that way you will never have to change all your services’ email addresses anymore, when you want to switch mail provider.
Yeah, this is gonna be my next move I think. I was using Proton VPN for a while and just recently started migrating my emails there, then they started doing all of this.
I wanted to self host my email anyway, but now I have no excuse. I’ve been burned by the last team I expected it to come from, I’ll be self-reliant now
That’s what I’m leaning towards. Now to think of a domain that’s easy enough I can tell my email over the phone of needed
How costly is a domain? Also how does one set it up, do you need a DNS server?
Most (if not all) domain providers also host DNS for you. After you buy your domain, you’ll need to go to the DNS settings and put some records given by your email provider (records are just made of a “type” such as A, MX, CNAME, TXT, a “domain” and the “content”).
A .com domain usually costs between 10 and 20 dollars per year. I think it’s worth it! There are many domain registrar you can choose from.
I personally like Porkbun, it’s cheap and it works great. In the past I used to like the French service Gandi, but it’s been recently acquired by a VC and now it’s gone to the pooper.
Me too. Same predicament. I was a paid user of Proton.
Just got moved over to paid Tuta, and it seemed to go smoothly.
SAME! I only just finished getting all my servers and custom domain set up, and I already have to look for a new provider.
If someone has any recommendations for a good hosted email, VPN and online storage provider let us know. It seems there’s not many good options left.
Self hosted ,or cloud?
Funny how they didn’t make actual post on Mastodon, but just silently edited their profile to say they left Mastodon? That’s pretty cowardly.
Yet another reason to not like Proton.
Nothing of value has been lost
Honest, stupid question: Why exactly is this such a big deal to so many of you? (I don’t use Mastodon.)
To me, the federated social network (Fediverse, which Mastodon is one portal into) offers some distinct advantages for pluralism. No single entity can control the whole discourse. When you don’t agree with your mods, you can go elsewhere without losing your connections with people: just move to a different instance.
Furthermore it’s not controlled by corporations, so there is no incentive of trying to spread things like the plague just to get you addicted and make as much money.
In practice the design of the Fediverse leaves some problems open (notably, moving between servers comes at a cost to the online identity you built, and getting bootstrapped if you don’t have real-life connections who are interested is more difficult) and it even creates some interesting problems of its own. But all in all it’s better already than the mono-idea, “there is one norm everyone should stick to” culture we see on commercial offerings.
Proton recently got shot in the foot when one of their board members said some stuff that made it sound like he was somehow not certain that fascists are bad for privacy. The guy responded and clarified and made some good points…and still very clearly did not realize or did not feel it important to mention or even imply that fascists are very definitely bad for privacy. This is still post-record-scratch for Proton.
So leaving what’s basically the only social media of the future, such as it is, and sticking it out in the garbage heaps, makes two data points that make a line that goes in the direction of “definitely going to enshittify”. It’s possible this could be wrong, because two data points isn’t huge, but these are also things that were extremely easy to get right, and require an oddly large amount of effort to fuck up like they have.
Thanks for the reply! I was only aware of the CEO’s X comments regarding Trump’s politics. I JUST moved away from Google and have been quite happy with Proton, especially Mail and Pass.
Another L by Proton. Why would they even say it and just stop posting silently.
Even if you agree with Proton’s positions it’s clear that Andy is just tanking the company’s image with such rookie leadership mistakes.
Incredibly incompetence which makes you wonder how competent the actual code running everything is?
due to limited ressources
Is it that hard to post the same thing on various social media? Maybe it is, I wouldn’t know. But that sounds like a shitty excuse.
It looks like they’re not up to date on X tho, hopefully they drop that shit. And they’re on Bluesky, which, if not Mastodon, is a little bit better I guess.
I really don’t get the hidden idea behind leaving Mastodon.
They are still on Bluesky, but they are not active anymore.
Their last post if from 14 days ago, not sure how often they usually post tho
Man. Right when I was about to buy into the ecosystem and get away from google.
[edit]: slightly less worried after reading this: https://lemm.ee/post/55314225
Didn’t the CEO of Proton lick the Trump boot recently?
Andy is a cuck.
Fucking disgusting
People on here like complain and will tell that he has his balls in his mouth when in reality all he did was show some hope after the Republicans appointed someone who has a track record of being anti-bigtech. I still think the way the situation was handled terribly, but to say that he is MAGA would be a hell of a stretch in my opinion
I wonder how that’s working out for him.
So it came as a surprise last month when Proton CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party in a post on X, declaring that “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” When the tweet went viral, Proton’s official Reddit account posted a now-deleted comment stating that “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”
show some hope huh
Yeah so uh youre proving my point, he’s happy that the nominated person is more favorable to small businesses than the one previously nominated by the Democrats. Wether it’s true or false I don’t know, but this post (and his other posts form before and after the event) to me don’t suggest MAGA
Then I just don’t know what to tell ya. It’s right there.
They did, yes.
I’m assuming the next video to be released will be of the Proton CEO and Trump on on some fetish.
“oh yeah, encrypt me daddy”
I mean, it makes sense for a company to focus on a platform with a large user base. Social media managers aren’t free.
It doesn’t make sense when that company is founded on concepts of privacy and they axe the (relatively) private platform instead of the exploitative one full of Nazis and anti-consumerism.
I’m not sure being full of Nazis would be an issue for proton
I disagree, Proton is a privacy company with more followers on Mastodon than on Threads and TikTok. Should they also drop what Linux support they have to focus only on Windows because it has a large base? This feels alienating to their privacy conscious users if anything.
Yeah, this is what’s kinda worrying me about this move. Proton’s got a pretty good name with folks who are security conscious. This move feels more like they are kinda trying to pivot, to cash in litterally years of good reputation for something else. That’d suck at the best of times, but in the second Trump era? Really just ain’t any good answers to what they might be cashing that in for.
Setting up some basic bridge functionality is probably not that difficult either, so they could just mirror their xitter posts.
Playing devil’s advocate, someone has to moderate replies on the mirrors though.
You can moderate replies?
shrug
lol
I’m a proton user but I’m out of the loop. Please paste link or give me the tl/dr?
Whoo boy. The Proton CEO posted a deeply troubling remark praising trump and republicans as the champions of the little guy, and lambasted democrats for being in the pocket of big tech. This, understandably, seemed rather… icky to a great many people, who dislike the idea of the service they trust for privacy kissing the ring of the Fascist in Chief/Putin’s Towelboy/Elon’s Hamberder Carrier. This might have been more palatable if it was made clear that Proton itself does NOT endorse the policies of Melon Husk’s puppet administration and the MAGAt Horde, and that the original post was made by the CEO in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as the CEO of Proton.
So when, in the face of backlash from the federated community, Proton decided to just leave the fediverse, rather than clarify its position, but stay on Reddit & the Xitter, using the half-baked excuse of “it’s too expensive for us to cross-post on this completely free system”, people, understandably, took this to indicate that Proton, previously one of the most trusted privacy companies, may not be as independent as its swiss headquarters leads one to believe.
Hugely disappointing! Can’t believe in a single thing!
Here’s one archive reddit thread proton responded with that has since been edited to remove the comment.
There’s also a medium article from a random user that keeps being reposted to defend him. https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
But, it leaves out that Gail Slater left the FTC to became vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association which is a lobbying group for companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
The Internet Association—a trade group for big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—spent nearly $176,000 to lobby the California legislature last quarter, according to the Washington Post. It is now running misleading ads on social media asking Sacramento lawmakers to weaken the law.
The group claims that surveillance-based advertising technology, which slurps up and broadly spreads consumers’ personal data without their knowledge, should be exempted from the CCPA. In truth, surveillance-based adtech is one of the worst privacy hazards that the law was designed to stop. It also provides little benefit to online publishers, and erodes trust between companies and their consumers.
Which is a pretty big omission if the argument the founder/CEO made hinges on trying to make people believe Gail Slater having been on the FTC means she fights for little tech.
Guess I made the right choice to leave Proton.
Looks like Tuta’s getting my business now.
Do you believe a country that’s part of the 14 Eyes, in which the far-right party just won the most votes in the recent election, is going to be a surefire supporter of your email privacy? Also, do you believe that Tuta would refuse a court order by the German government to turn over your data?
Just curious, what would you recommend for an email provider, or more importantly a VPN for someone in the US? A few months ago I was thinking of switching from BTGuard to proton VPN. But after a bunch of stories came out about them recently, I am no longer so interested.
There’s a few different options for VPN.
- I would suggest Njalla. They offer a VPN, domain name registration, and VPS services. They’re based in Costa Rica, and they have a bit of an infamous reputation for protecting quite a few piracy sites, so you don’t have to worry about them caring if you’re sailing the High Seas.
- Mullvad is another one that’s recommended, but they apparently removed the option to port forward after they got heat for supporting piracy, from what I’ve heard from users. I don’t know if that’s true, so you would have to ask around.
- There’s also cryptostorm, if you’re REALLY paranoid. They offer a token based authentication system that doesn’t use accounts, so they don’t keep any information on their users. Instead, the token starts a timer as soon as you first use it. You can purchase tokens using cryptocurrency, so if you’re into that, you could make it so they have no idea who you are, and there’s no information they could provide to the authorities.
- Host your own. You can set up a VPN service pretty easily by renting a VPS and just installing the needed software. This has the added bonus of you probably not needing to worry about websites blocking you for being on a VPN. You could also very easily do something like set up fedi software such as Lemmy or Mastodon, or use it to host a blog or whatever.
I would not recommend Proton if you’re going to be pirating. Proton uses a random port for forwarding each time you connect, to make it harder for people to pirate. I use it, but my download clients are Docker containers that use a script that automatically sets them to the right port each time Proton connects, so there’s no issue. Otherwise, I would have to manually set the correct port every time I used the client. Proton is hosted in Switzerland, which is outside the US jurisdiction, so despite the recent uproar over them, they are the safest choice since it’s illegal for them to provide private information to other governments, such as the US.
As for mail service, it’s not difficult to find good ones, since mail is pretty simple, but keep in mind that there is no mail service that’s going to refuse a court order for your data from their own government, so if you’re planning on doing something illegal, or if you’re going to be engaging in activism, then you need to find a provider that’s outside the jurisdiction of your country or it’s allies. For someone in the US, that might mean going to Switzerland or Russia for a provider. Any mail service will do fine, as you can easily encrypt your mail using PGP. There are some that would say that’s not secure enough, and while they have a point that it’s not the most secure, it’s good enough for the vast majority of users. Most people aren’t talking about anything that a government or hacker is going to want bad enough they spend the time decrypting your emails. And if they did want it that bad, it would be easier for a government to just raid your house and poke through your computer as they please.
njalla will hold your domain hostage if you used them to register it and if they decide they don’t like you as a customer. I do not recommend using them at all, but if you do definitely have a backup plan in case they kill your domain and refuse to give it back to you.
Unfortunately, they lock you in. If they decide the AfD is their best friend, you can’t get the emails out of their system because they don’t have an email export function…
Come on, do you really think going to a mail provider located in a country with an intelligence agreement with the US, and with a prominent far-right political party that got the most votes in the recent election could possibly be a bad idea?
I’m forward thinking like that 😉
The CDU is right-wing but not far-right and they won the election by a significant margin.
In Switzerland, the SVP has received the most votes every single election since 1999, is further right than the German CDU and shares nearly all positions with the AfD.
In particular, it wants to stop the influence of the justice system on politics and make every foreigner requesting citizenship dependent on receiving the popular vote in a referendum. Also, unlike the CDU, it opposes gay marriage.
what’s this “email export” function doing here then?
Email export is available in their desktop client
That explains why I never saw it 😐 I don’t understand why they would only add it in the web client. It’s just their website running in electron.
I’ve been giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I’m kinda done with them. Anyone have any suggestions for a mail provider? I’m not yet willing to self-host that.
While not exactly privacy focused, I’ve been using zoho for a while. Really happy with it. I distrust most of the ones that sell privacy as their main thing, because email is not designed to be private.
I’ve been using Tuta Mail for over 5 years.
I’ve been happy with mailbox.org. I left proton after the boot licking. I had been a paying customer for years.
I just signed up for mailbox.org, let’s see how this goes
But are they on Mastodon? This is a very important factor for my purchasing decision.
The have their own single-user instance.
Posteo
Posteo unfortunately doesn’t support custom domains.
Yes, for a reason. You have to register with a name and an address to obtain/buy a custom domain at a third party. Your identity could be traced back via this. This is against their very strict and consistent ‘zero knowledge’ policy.
Hmm I don’t agree. You can always sign up using a foreign mail provider with a domain privacy service.
Could you break this down in how that works?
- I register a domain using a service in a country outside of the EU (since Posteo is German).
- I also apply a “privacy protection” service, which means my data won’t be visible in the public whois (the domain will be officially registered by the privacy service that I use).
- I sign up to Posteo and configure my third-party domain.
This means Posteo doesn’t know anything about me, and even if the police raids Posteo they can’t find who I am.
Of course they could, in theory, find out who I am, but that means going to the provider that I used to sign up for my domain, which may be on the other side of the planet outside of German police jurisdiction.
Thanks 🙏, but what you describe is a theoretical option, right? Posteo doesn’t offer to integrate such a custom domain afaik - but please correct me if I’m wrong! Do you use Posteo with a custom domain?
It’s sad, I really like their UI
If you’re afraid of self-hosting, https://mailcow.email/ is pretty great and easy to setup for that if you want to go to this adventure, else, Tuta would be their main competitor but I don’t really like their UI
If all you need is mail, Tuta.
This is a genuine question : how Proton stopping using Mastodon for communication make them bad ?
They’re supporting commercialized, walled-garden social media platforms instead of ones that are publicly accessible
Because they are exclusively on the Nazi social media now. You do the math.
My understanding is that their users were calling them to account pretty heavily on Mastodon. This is a way for them to curtail that (and save face) without answering to the users there over the CEO’s pro-Republican/pro-Trump statements. They can’t control the narrative on Mastodon so they’re running away.
This is despite the fact that a lot of privacy focused potential customers aren’t using Twitter or Bluesky or Threads. In fact, the userbase on Mastodon that followed their account was larger than that of both Bluesky and Threads.
Makes sense, thanks a lot !
Because it sends a message that they do not support community-driven projects and will instead support large, corporate social media.
It would not have meant anything if they were never on Mastodon in the first place.
I‘ve been quite tolerant sine now, but this goes to far to leave a mostly left platform.
Does anyone know if its possible to leave Proton and get my money back, as Im in a plan for a couple of months.
