I have Proton email and will ditch it soon.
This is very disappointing.
They have a large following on Mastodon so this doesn’t really make much sense. I’m inclined to believe that they left due to the hate they were getting because of the recent controversy.
What is the recent controversy?
The CEO came out as a fascist
Like Elon Musk recently?
This is just…not accurate.
CEO is what I describe as a Right-wing Libertarian. Dude not only praised the trump FTC appointee, but also said “republicans are on the side of the ‘little guy’”. Andy Yen is one of the members of the Board of Trustees of Proton Foundation, the non-profit that owns a majority of Proton AG. He initially used his personal account, then later used the official account (so I’m assuming the other board members did not object to it), then later “apologized” for it and said he would use his personal accounts. The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows 🤷♂️.
From what I could gather from his public statements, including twitter: Andy Yen is also supportative of Ukraine and have donated to Ukraine, and is supportative of the Hong Kong protestors, and is against Russian censorship and against US red state’s Age Verification laws.
My view is: Andy Yen is an idiot, and there shouldn’t be any immediate threats, but its still not a bad idea to pre-emptively move, if you can, just in case he pulls a “Musk” and does the salute tomorrow.
The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows
I mean this part I give him a pass on. It was right for people reading him to raise an eyebrow, because political signalling like that does happen, especially in a context where he’s making comments like he made. But in this case it was just a nothingburger.
It doesn’t make his “wasn’t intended to be a political comment” excuse any less gibberish though.
The whole 88 thing is not generally know except probably in Germany and the US.
He is an idiot yes, but the internet is also making it seem like if you agree with one statement you agree with all statements of that person/party which is just wrong.
Always use your own domain on Proton and others. The laws in Germany aren’t as friendly as the one in Swiss so that can be causing issues as well.
He also used the word “triggered” in the Reddit comments in the way right wingers are wont to do, and then tried to play the “I’m not American, I don’t understand how that word looks to you” card. Never mind that plenty of non-Americans know perfectly well how that looks.
No, it’s far more likely he picked up that word and knew exactly how it was used because he’s been hanging out in far right spaces.
as a european I have no idea what tertiary meaning does “triggered” have
Never heard the 88 thing till now. Not everyone is tied to what shit bags are doing all the time.
Its a really old one. Neo nazis have ysed it for multiple generations now
Like the “14 words”
We unfortunately live in the world where saying “Trump is an idiot” and “Actually I was kidding. He’s the second coming of Christ” might only be a day apart.
Yeah. They can’t get Mastodon moderators to suppress negative publicity like they can on Reddit and other platforms.
if they cant suppress on reddit, they will go to facebook, which give them ability to do alot more.
They haven’t left bluesky but they got backlash there too and have stopped being active for the past couple of weeks compared to on Twitter.
I think this is right on the money.
So glad I moved away from Proton a few weeks ago. They seem to be going downhill.
Add one more to the tally. Did the offer a reason?
Probably because Andy Yen (CEO) was rightfully called out on Mastodon for saying that Republicans stand with the “little guy”
Of all the fuckin places to move to they chose reddit 😭
Because they can control the dialog on reddit
I’m sad too. But I think it’s quite logical given people that use Mastodon probably already know or heard of proton. Marketing is particularly effective for people that don’t know of them (at least while they are small)
Again??? Isn’t this like, the third time they do this?
Drama. Drama. Deama
people were using the vpn to evade reddit bans, but even reddit does not like vpn users anymore.
For real? Man, at this rate, I might have to switch away from their products, I really hope they get their act together really really soon…
Can someone recommend a good and privacy oriented alternative to Proton Drive.
It’s sad that Proton bought SimpleLogin because I was and I’m currently using it before the acquisition.
CryptPad. It doesn’t needs email to sign up.
Tuta mail
Tuta are also enshittifying.
How so?
They show you ads as a premium user and spam your inbox with “news” that’s just poorly disguised upsell attempts.
Do they? I haven’t experienced either of these. Where would I find the ads? Curious if my pihole is hiding them
Nextcloud on a paid plan from some company (e.g. Hetzner) or, if you’ve got the stones for it, Nextcloud self-hosted.
I’m seriously starting to consider moving from proton to Fastmail. My renewal is coming up in May.
Is Fastmail US based?
Australia
Ah, so 5 eyes. Tuta is German so 14 eyes. Not a lot of options out there
There’s also Migadu which I currently use. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that providers like Proton and Tuta have with their E2EE but they don’t use any shady marketing or track you. Requires a custom domain though.
I never heard of them, I’ll check them out. Thanks!
I switched after the CEO came out supporting Trumps nomination and the republicans being the party of the small guy
I switched after the whole CEO issue, but tbh I was annoyed at how limited proton mail was because of encryption. Super happy with Fastmail in comparison! Got 2 domains linked, multiple servers using it for SMTP, a bunch of aliases and masked emails. Calendar and contacts setup on android with DAVx5 to de-google some more. So good.
This is my exact setup, too. It works without any problem using either thunderbird or their web UI.
I tried Proton years ago and didn’t find it that useful (I can manage my own PGP keys, thank you).
Started switching to Fastmail seriously this month, after having had mail delivery problems with mailbox.org because of DNSSEC issues (they use a deprecated SHA1 signature still) - I have used migadu.com for a different domain for a few years as well but the webmail is a bit sluggish and the spam filter too aggressive, I might end up consolidating on Fastmail for now
Sure it’s Five Eyes so a slight regression from mailbox and migadu, but if it works well enough I might be able to get my family to move off of Gmail so a net win
Consider mailbox.org too.
Cool, I’ll check them out.
I’ve never used Proton. I use Njalla
Isn’t Njalla a registrar?
I so want to ditch Proton right now, but I have a lot of resumes out and have been using them for ~4 years, so all of my accounts are linked in a sense.
What to do what to do… I know and fully agree that what’s going on is sus, but I think I need to stick with it for a few more months until the job thing pans out.
Edit: I have a free Tuta account, I’ll start weaning everything off, then cut free when I don’t need to worry about missing an interview opportunity.
yea i used alot emails for my resume when i was job seeking, the one i used switched over during covid, limit “inacitivity to 6 months, deletes your account”, wish it dint. i unfortunately sitll use gmail, although i dont do anything signicant, need another one that doesnt delete your acc after a minimum amount of time. im using another service, thats not gmail or microsofts.
i would probably move all your resumes to another account, put it all on a cloud(i did it with drive, you can do it with dropbox?) and any new resumes use another email service.
I recommend switching to a custom domain in the future so you can avoid situations like this from happening again, this way you won’t be locked down onto a single provider.
Sorry, could you please expand on that? Like buying your own domain and hosting your own email server? Or buying a domain and having Proton as the mail server backend?
Buying your own domain and pointing its DNS at your email provider. The email provider is still your host, but you get to use [email protected] everywhere and you can seamlessly switch providers. I’ve done it a few times, now.
That’s in line with being from Switzerland. Act cool, but be sure to stick with the richer people and do their interest. Never used Proton (I use Tuta instead) for that reason only. You are free to call me racist.
I am Swiss myself and I feel like things are changing since Trumps second term, at least my friends seek closer ties to Europe now.
Proton gives me a bad feeling in the stomach, I would encourage people to not trust it. The guy is either a big Trump fan or most of his customers are from that base. The best option for e-mail is selfhost + pgp, the second best option are the various small companies offering email all across Europe.
Does Europe in your first sentence mean the EU or Europe in general, maybe even including Russia?
Russia
lol Russia is not particularly popular here right now, we are even on their list of “unfriendly countries” if you didn’t know.
Tuta isnt really a replacement for proton. They dont even support PGP encryption, which is kinda the whole point of proton.
Tuta uses standard algorithms also being used by PGP (AES and RSA or ECC) for encrypting the entire mailbox. In addition, Tuta Mail already uses post-quantum cryptography (Kyber) for quantum safe accounts, which is still a work in progress for PGP. Furthermore, Tuta does not use an implementation of PGP itself because PGP lacks important requirements that we have for Tuta
Read the last sentence. They dont use PGP for emails.
Find me how you can send PGP emails to someone off tuta. You can’t. They disabled it.
With proton its one click.
They give a reason.
And, if this is what we are talking about, sending a PGP email to a non Proton still requires more than one click and agreement equal, in my experience, to sharing a password for encrypted emails on Tuta.
