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).
Fsck em and feed em fish heads
At least we know where their loyalties actually lie, now.
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.
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).
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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.
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Do you think there’s nothing that archives the content from Reddit? How do you think they knew it was removed?
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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.
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?
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There are a lot of people misquoting the made comments from Proton. They are just really stupid for making comments like this.
If you use their services, use it with your own domain
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.
I suggest Mullvad as an alternative to Protons VPN services.
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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.
Wow. That is so much worse.
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 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.
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
Yikes, to using an outrage bait twitter post as the OP.
Also, to the lazy ‘they’re fascist’ criticism based on exactly no facts
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.
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.
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.
Nope there isn’t, is the owner of Reddit also doing Nazi salute’s? Cause I missed that one.
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
oddly satisfying upvote ratio
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.
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.
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For me, the main advantage of the model is “you cannot conveniently observe everyone’s activity from one place”.
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.
Can’t have privacy for your speech if you don’t have the freedom to speak in the first place.
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
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.
Reddit has been taken over by right wing mods, particularly Russian state sponsored trolls. They take over management of subreddits to spread misinformation. They will even pay off the old mods. Reddit admins don’t do anything about it. I guess it’s a built in flaw to their (anyone is free to make a community/subreddit) premise. If you don’t stop shitty people, they will make it shitty.
I was tempted to cancel after the CEO comments on politics, Reddit is a bit much though.
Reddit privacy policy is dog shit, having a company advertise privacy and use Reddit is comical
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”.
Ooh okay thank you.
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Yeah, their Linux dev team consists of two people, who, I believe only handle Linux things as part of their responsibilities and there is no dedicated team. I’m not salty that people have been asking for a Linux drive client for 4 years and the only response came this year saying ‘there’s only two people we’re focused on mail and vpn clients at the moment’.
Not trying to take away from Yen saying dumb shit with the company account or any of the mounting criticisms they’ve earned of late. Just a point toward their explanation not actually being too far out of the realm of possibility. And the likelihood of their PR/Social Media team being similarly small to the point of being understaffed.
Like yeah, this is needlessly antagonistic and blunt? Sure, but that feels more down to bad copy than the actual intent and direction of a companies PR dept, right?
“Due to a need for consolidation in the face of limited resources we will no longer be able to maintain our current scope of social media presence. This account will remain active and be updated automatically but for the foreseeable future it will be unmonitored. Please join us on Reddit or contact support if you have any questions! Thanks Mastodon, toot on!”
Explains more clearly the logistical need to limit focus without disregarding the importance of the community. Someone hire me, I need a job. Leaves the account open to be reactivated some day and there’s no reason they couldn’t automate posting there.
I use ProtonVPN on Linux and I don’t even use a client. There’s Wireguard and OpenVPN right there.
Drive was mentioned, not vpn. The vpn client even works.
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.
This is good news. It means we aren’t monitizeable enough.
I get tired of being so right all of the time
