Any alternative free VPN’s
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.
R*ddit 💀
I wonder if Andy was watching fuckface destroy Unity, and just thought to himself, What could I say or do to aggressively power-fuck the Proton brand?
That doesn’t take lot ressource for communication on both social network.
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 (https://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”.
Thank i didn’t see from this perspective. On mastodon the character limit is very small so i didn’t understand how difficult it could be as i would do the same communication everywhere to stay consistent.
In my opinion, they wanted to avoid the backfire from their ceo supporting Trump.
You’re welcome to believe whatever makes you happy in this post truth hellscape we live in.
But reddit (generally left on drugs, center-right on social issues) tears into them pretty regularly for that. Bluesky seems to be left-center-left-ish and is also a place where people can tear into the account. And while there are much better moderation tools on both platforms, that still doesn’t protect them for the equivalent of a trending hashtag or /all post.
We can only speculate but considering plenty of people have criticized the mastodon community over the past year or so (Alec from Technology Connections being a great example where, if anything, he should be our patron saint rather than the guy who gets harassed any time his posts get surfaced by The Algorithm) AND basically the entire “internet” decided on bluesky… it likely really is just cost cutting and not caring enough to monitor the mastodon account.
Also, it looks like they have a Threads account anyway? https://www.threads.net/@protonprivacy. Which means that the Mastodon users can still follow them? I forgot what the status on federation with facebook ended up being.
It’s kinda weird though. Mastodon can have a pretty high character limit, on par with a reddit comment length.
The instance my author account is on has it set to a much higher limit. Enough so that I can post a short story in two, maybe three sections.
If it’s the lowest possible character limit that’s the problem, they could definitely get around that with damn near zero effort.
Which is whatever, I get that streamlining social media reduces time costs, I’m more questioning the one they chose in terms of how much upkeep it’ll be compared to other options. Reddit is going to have a lot more bullshit to wade through.
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.
So first taking Trump’s side and now that…
After Andy Yen’s endorsement of the orange utan, I would seriously reconsider using any Proton product.
Yen tried to backpedal meekly several times since then, to get out of the pickle he got himself into with his definitely-not-impressed customers, but it’s a bit late for that: either he’s pro-Trump or he’s naive. Either way, he makes Proton sketchy.
Any alternatives for their VPN service with port forwarding?
Mullvad (or Mullvad on a router with Adguard)
Mullvad no longer has port forwarding.
There are none of them as good as Proton.
For example, AirVPN hasn’t had any security audits and doesn’t seem too interested in them either due to monetary concerns. That’s a deal breaker for me.
Private internet access is nice
They have port forwarding, but they were bought by a company that has been caught stuffing malware into purchased programs. Basically, it was a company that has a history of buying out otherwise legitimate software brands, and then bulking them with adware as a quick cash grab on the existing customers.
That buyout was like 4 or 5 years ago, but it left a sour taste in many people’s mouths. Because everyone expected the PIA client to silently get bulked with adware one day. Since trust is basically the only reason to casually use a VPN, it pushed a lot of their users to alternatives.
Airvpn, or Azirevpn if you’re ok with few servers
Of those I’ve only used Azire, and it worked well. I’ve seen Airvpn recommended often though
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.
Here is the tweet - if that’s not the most flagrant Trump bootlicking, I don’t know what is:
And here is the backpedal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/
Believe what you will. I believe what I read.
Here is the tweet
I know exactly what you’re referring to.
if that’s not the most flagrant Trump bootlicking, I don’t know what is
I agree, you don’t know what is. Agreeing with a single decision someone makes is not an endorsement. But that’s exactly the kind of irrational dichotomic reaction I expect from society these days.
And here is the backpedal
I don’t see anything here that could be construed as backpedaling. If he were smart he would have, but if anything, he doubled down several times.
I believe what I read.
You didn’t read that, you made it up.
It’s kind of stupid to say that Republicans aren’t the party of big business anymore. Both parties are parties of big business.
If you want to claim it was a stupid thing to say, I will agree with you 100%. If you want to claim that it was a tacit endorsement specifically of Trump, you are just wrong and spreading disinformation.
“No you don’t get it! Supporting trump isn’t really supporting trump! Just bc the CEO likes Trump’s policy and endorsed him doesn’t mean he endorsed him!”
Normal people don’t jerk off Trump like that. Dude is blatantly a Nazi, if you can’t see it that says a lot about you
“Anyone who disagrees with me is a Trump supporter and a nazi!”
See, I too can make up things that you didn’t say and put it in quotes and pretend like you did.
I’ll sometimes agree with stuff Trump does too, like appointing Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m not going to say this means Republicans have become the party of anti war lol
You agree with Trump about something?! How dare you, nazi!
What’s good about the Tulsi Gabbard here? Unless you just mean she (like all the Trump appointees) is the worst person for the job and it’ll make the country collapse faster lol
I wouldn’t call that boot licking. Maybe a misguided opinion.
I think he internet mob went a little hard on this one.
A perfectly guided opinion. You do get why the CEO likes Trump and left the fediverse while staying on Twitter, right?
Looking at the board of directors for the proton foundation, I’d say people are jumping to conclusions way too fast about proton.
I don’t like that they’re ditching Mastodon to focus on reddit. But, it makes sense in a marketing perspective. Reddit has a LOT more users, and potential customers. If they indeed don’t have the resources to manage both then Reddit is the best option if they want to attract more people as customers. On Mastodon they’re pretty much preaching to the choir.
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.
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.
Sure sure. The guy who unprompted endorsed a trump appointment that has deep US Telco ties, bizarrly said “the GOP is the party for the little guy,” had nothing but wonderful things to say about J.D vance, stated that Chuck Schumer slow rolled 2 internet privacy bills because of “quid pro quo” with his daughters working for big tech, used the phrase “triggered” unprompted, and just randomly added “88” to the end of his new user name.
Yeah, that guy is just neutral and disillusioned with the Democratic party. It’s not utterly clear what spaces and politics he aligns with. That would just be wholley unknowable.
It wasn’t unprompted - he was literally replying to the announcement of the appointment on Twitter. An announcement of a person he thought would be great for a role that he’s apparently been advocating for action against big tech in for years.
He’s born in 1988 you dolt.
The ugliest thing about Lemmy I’ve noticed so far is that it enjoys disinformation just as much as Reddit - as long as it fits the circlejerk, updoots this way.
Huh, I noticed you cherry picked two things to try to refute (interesting that you ignored him hiding “88” in binary and the fact he specifically tagged Trump in that tweet) and ignored all the others I listed. Its almost like you want to spread disinfo about how this is a non issue instead of actually digging into it.
Explain his fandom for J.D vance (a tech millionaire funded by the biggest, most privacy invading, facebook funding, Palentir creating tech billionaire ever, Peter theil) while endlessly criticizing Chuck Schumer, his statement that the GOP “was there for the little guy,” that the GOP was going to take on big tech even while they bent the knee and were donating millions directly to Trump in real time, his use of the term “triggered” to describe offending someone, on and on.
Go on, keep excusing all the clear MAGA “mask on” indicators. Tell us why a CEO in a foreign country, that keeps heaping praise on one party while using their cultural shibboleths, also “coincidentally” used an in-group dog whistle, is actually totally non partisan. That should be easy, right?
This comment is a perfect example of why I have written https://loudwhisper.me/blog/proton-fediverse-burnout/
The 88 thing is the complete tip of the iceberg for me. I can’t honestly imagine the thought process needed to reach a conclusion that a Taiwanese guy (8 is a lucky number) born in '88 would put that number as a dog-whistle (which is not really part of his own cultural landscape) for Nazis, while dealing with a PR issue.
It’s like looking at a crashed car, tire marks on the ground and suggesting it must have been a sharknado and not a car accident.
Nicely written blog post, it actually sums it up pretty nicely imo
“Hide your power level” mask on behavior from the alt right love to play these plausible deniability games while still signaling their actual intent. You see it with the “my heart goes out to” or “i’m just autisitc” cover for musks nazi salute, or the “he was just waving” Bannon nazi salute. They made a nazi salute, but of course it cant be a nazi salute, wink wink.
I honestly find the 88 to be a faint indicator in this case, but it was a wildly tone deaf one if so. When someone claiming neutrality is making very partisan endorsements for a party that’s steeped in all of the same memetic game playing, you cant ignore the dog whistles.
The problem is that those arguments are not falsifiable. If not one, but two completely reasonable explanation cannot convince you of someone motivations, nothing can. However, I don’t care if Musk did or did not a Nazi salute. His actions speak much louder (in a bad sense) than the aesthetic that he decides to adopt. Proton donation pattern for example would be a strong indicator to measure intentions.
but it was a wildly tone deaf one if so
Maybe. But also maybe people are allowed to have different cultural references, and in a global context (i.e., the internet) we should expect diversity. I - for example - had never heard of this 88 thing, and I would definitely not think about it at all the next time I create a username, and I didn’t think it when I went to a barber shop that has that number in the name. Likewise, I wouldn’t call anybody writing “Merry Xmas” tone deaf for missing the reference to the X MAS of infamous history (and just recently in the news). For some people it’s apparently impossible to see their culture as non-universal (at the cost of sounding stereotypical, folks from US have particularly this problem after decades of cultural hegemony).
for a party that’s steeped in all of the same memetic game playing, you cant ignore the dog whistles
This all happened before Musk/Bannon salute. Just to specify it.
It’s not utterly clear what spaces and politics he aligns with. That would just be wholley unknowable.
Well you’re right, of course, his alignment is knowable. In fact, if you read the article I linked, there’s lots of context for knowing his alignment. Maybe you should try reading it.
You’re going to have to bring receipts for those other claims.
At least personally I agree with the part of his statement about the corporate capture of the democratic party, I don’t think that’s the part most people have a problem with imo. It was saying that republicans are now the party of the little guy, or more likely to tackle abuses by big tech that was dumb. Obviously neither party is going to seriously go after any abuse or anything, but the richest tech CEO is blatantly running the country under the republican president, so saying they’re “more likely” to help is straight up a lie lol. I don’t think calling Andy a fascist is correct either, but I also very much disagree with his opinions of the republican party. Under either party billionaires and corporations are in control, but Trump is definitely not making that better at all.
And honestly all things considered Lina Khan was a pretty great FTC chair tbh, and Johnathan Kanter was pretty decent as the head of the antitrust division too. He was probably a lot better than Gail Slater will be. She’s literally a VP in a few different big companies, so touting her as a champion of the people against the abuses of big tech feels either misinformed or disingenuous.
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).
The only thing Yen should have done to be credible is shut the fuck up and not take any side, or express any political opinion. I expect no less from the CEO of a company that pretends to sell me privacy from a neutral country.
I’m not saying Yen is a raging magat. I’m saying the moment he opened his trap about US politics, he tainted his company and damaged its credibility.
Ah yes, I too require everyone else to only express views that agree with my own or else keep silent. Of course, I am the only person allowed to have nuanced opinions.
🤡
We don’t use real names on the internet for a reason. CEOs that use their own names as platforms should have a department (or at least a publicist) take a look at their posts as it can effect a company.
People are leaving the platform now because of something pretty avoidable.
“10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”
Yen said this as our government is being devoured by someone with massive conflicts of interest. In no way is this nuanced. It was in extremely poor taste and the worst time to say something political.
It’s not “his” company, the company is owned by the Proton foundation (of whatever it’s exactly called)
Yeah Yen is an idiot, but his power is more limited than with a normal CEO company structure and the Swiss law is a lot stricter than the competitors law in like Germany.
Just like with any of these mail servers, buy your own domain just incase the company switches gears and starts selling your data or whatnot
Do you have any recommendations for someone who just uses them for email?
Posteo is good. Have been using them for 2 years now.
Tutanota
Seconded, but they just go by Tuta now.
Hotmail. Been using it since high school and every data breach and fuck up taught me something new.
I’ve been using Tuta for more than 8 years now and had one serious issue with their service during this time (longer outage, pretty early on). Other than that I have nothing but positive experience with them.
They’re also based in Germany if that makes any difference.I’m happy Posteo.net user.
German and secure email service.
But unfortunately the web frontend isn’t quite as good, so if you are dependent on something like this then don’t use it.I was debating between proton and tuta, but I was able to get first.last@tuta so I’m happy that worked out now.
I made it, so I’m obviously very biased, but I think it’s better than Proton. It’s got some really useful organization and anti-spam features.
The labeling idea is pretty interesting, an email service with inbuilt proxy, but your website is pretty light on details. Stuff like pricing or custom domain support is absent.
Good point. I’ll add that.
I’m working on custom domain support right now. And pricing is pretty straightforward, since I only have extra storage and sending options. You get 500MB for free, and the ability to receive email. Sending is $1/month. I put that behind a paywall to prevent spammers from using Port87. As a small email service, if you send spam, the big players can blocklist you and kill your service. So, keeping my SMTP servers’ IP address reputation high is really important.
You can join the Discord to follow along with new features and updates:
“…join the Discord…”
Aaaaand I’m out.
I’ve been a Runbox customer for many years. Never had any problem with them. They’re located in privacy-friendly Norway.
Been very impressed with Runbox since Andy turned out to be an idiot.
Not OP, but I’ve been using Fastmail for a few years now and have had no issues with them.
Same, I just switched over to them and have had a good experience with it.
I’ve got an account with tilde.club
They even have a newsgroup service for the tilde community. It’s not full on Usenet and there aren’t any hosted files, but it’s a nice community feature.
You get a gigabyte soft cap (three gig hard cap and a week grace period to get back to soft cap) but it actually talks to google, for the time being, and I’ve been making an attempt at migrating to the point of using gmail as a ‘talking ot my republican family’ and ‘spam’ account.
I think im going to try it out. I dont like where proton is going.
https://tilde.club/signup/ https://tilde.club/wiki/faq.html
Remember. This is a hobbiest community. Personal recommendation is using tilde.club for emails, and spread your other needs across other tilde servers.
Yes commandline interaction is required.
Save your SSH keys not just on your computer but in a couple other secure places. If you have to pull them from backup, remember to reset the file’s permissions otherwise SSH won’t like them. Setting up a password backup is very helpful here especially since that will let you use your mail address with apps such as k-9 on android, or claws/thunderbird/outlook for desktop.
oh yeah def. Im going to donate if/when I take a look. sdf also has something similar.
Migadu!
I’m a happy mailbox.org user
Just switched and couldn’t be happier. Now I can use FairMail as a client and loving all the extra features.
I used a custom but generic sounding domain name which made the switch pretty seamless.
I use them too. Their web ui and app are totally ugly crap but if you use it with thunderbird or another mail app it’s good.
Fuck the fascists
That word has truly lost all meaning.
Nah, just they are to common and normalize now.
And you normalize them more if you dont like to call them by they name.
Sus af
Switched to Mullvad for VPN, Baikal for calendar and contacts, Tuta for professional mail, and considering Bitwarden or Buttercup for a password manager
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.
For sure a lot of advantages to not having all your eggs in one basket.
proton fans are bootlickers
Well this is certainly one of the decisions of all time. I guess we finally got our reaction from the board. I was waiting, hoping to hear some rebuke of Yen’s bullshit. Didn’t expect another intentional step into shit. Bye Felicia.
Lmao k bye Proton
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.
Namecrane, I think they are Canadian
Mailbox.org located in Germany and run by Peer Heinlein. You can use your own Domain with it just fine
Tuta is €3.60 a month or €3 a month if you pay for an entire year (€36) not sure if that’s “cheap” in your budget.
A .com domain is like $12 per year
Tuta takes like 48 hours to respons, slower than Proton who takes about 12-24 hours, but as long as the response is under 1 week, its fine by me.
I have only been using Tuta for like a month, still not sure if I’m staying tho…
There’s also Mailbox.org which is also about €3 a month, which doesn’t have encryption by default and they don’t have an official opensource client. (Tuta has their client on F-Droid)
Tuta takes like 48 hours to respons, slower than Proton who takes about 12-24 hours, but as long as the response is under 1 week, its fine by me.
Are you talking about support request response time here? Or what response time?
Support response time. In my experience, Proton usually responds faster.
I been using Canadian webhost hosterbox.com for several years. Been very happy with them.
tuta.com is great for me so far
Tuta Mail is free for personal use, though you must accept a few limitations. The free edition lets you send and receive all the secure messages you want, and it includes a secure calendar. Searching encrypted email is limited—with the free edition, you can only search messages up to a month old. Paying 36 euros per year for a Revolutionary subscription ($38.65 as of this writing) removes that search limitation, lets you have multiple calendars, and adds features including filtering rules and 15 alias email addresses (more about those later). It also raises the storage for your messages from 1GB to 20GB.
yea I just went with a paid plan right off the bat since I have a custom domain, has been totally fine
Not even Bluesky, they went straight to Reddit. Shame.
It’s a sad day when “you can find us over on Discord” is a better option.
At least reddits getting selfaware enough that every other post is ppl getting mad at ppl telling them to google since those posts are what they find off google, or they’ve already googled and found nothing.
The immediate assumption that everyone is an idiot who hasnt tried to google is annoying but used to be valid, ppl got lazy there (including me) and would just ask questions that were easily googleable, the issue is those posts are now first on google and none of them have answers lol
Welp, I guess I’m switching to Tuta now.
I just set up a paid account on Tuta today replacing my paid Proton account.
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
Much rather not maintain any email in any way.
Congratulations, you are no longer available to function in today’s society
I think their comment was tongue in cheek :) like they’re saying you need to pay for server maintenance
That’s what Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Google Workspace Starter, and Proton Mail Essentials are all priced at. Seems like the market price to me
Use Disroot
how come?
What kind of expensive resources you need to just post on Mastodon?
A human being.
Whoever posts on reddit can copy paste to other platforms, if they are to lazy to use a software that consolidates it for them.
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
Mastodon has that too, so Wonder why leave Mastodon at all
But people still can see the other messages. Instead a censored post on Reddit or Instagram is invisible
deleted by creator
Makes sense
reddit allows you more ability to censor people permanently from the site, in the form of sitewide bans and automatic removals and such. and they can probably with the request of the admins take down any other proton subreddit that is potentially critical of them. and reddit recently has given mods more privileges to ban people with thier filters.
Good to know, thank you
i came here from reddit because of such a ban, apparently if you report someone too much you can get banned, or if you report and the mod doesnt like it you can recieve a sub ban, or even sitewide temp or permaban, and alot of the mods have admins ears, so you can get banned more easily. thats why proton wants to go to reddit, they just remove all negative comments, and ban people. and reddits ban feature is very intense(any attempt an evasion is pretty difficult nowawadays)
