In an unexpected mask off “secure” email and VPN provider Proton took the stance of siding with the fascist MAGA Reps. Proton’s services are no option for me and many others any longer. Let’s collect and discuss alternatives (E2E encrypted email and VPN) here 🔐👇
Always try to provide:
-Server location (jurisdiction)
-Governance
-Integrity/trustworthiness/transparency
-User experience/ease of use (grade 1 to 10, lets take Proton as a benchmark with an 8)
-Pricing and links
If you know alternative setups, feel free to share, too.
#ProtonExodus
Background: https://lemmy.ca/comment/13913116
Edit:typo
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I’ll still continue using proton, as I haven’t seen them staying from their goal just yet, but I’d love to see some alternatives non the less.
this idea of if you use a product you have to support every belief the company have is absolutely insane, like why can’t you recognize that a company’s products and it’s beliefs are two separate things? yeah the beliefs do effect the product but not all of them (especially not in this case like bro its ceos personal belief), why are we living in a time where you either have to %100 support something or you have %100 be against it? the fact that even a small political stand that someone dont agree with can turn them against a company or even a person is crazy to me
anyway i understand you made this choice and even tho i dont agree with the reasoning ill also provide 2 alternatives for vpn: mullvad and ivpn, both dont require email for account creation and accept monero payment, you probably heard them before
for email i suggest hosting your own if you have the time, there is this great project named docker-mailserver and its really easy to setup, but if you dont want to go through the effort feel free to check numerous alternatives others provided
Why? I try not to buy from companies that employ child or slave labour (Nestlé) or drain the water supply in drought regions (also Nestlé) or companies that support fascists (Müller and apparently Proton) because voting with my wallet is the only choice I have for even a slim chance of making my opinion heard in this capitalist hellscape.
child/slave labour is a lot different than a twitter post that you dont agree with
Of course. But on the end it boils down to: company does something I don’t condone, so I don’t give them money.
I agree with you but I also think it’s reasonable to not do business with an organization that you disagree with for a lot of reasons. One of the simplest reasons is that you’re giving someone that you disagree with more money.
I’m not a vegan myself but I understand and I appreciate how far vegans will go not to support animal cruelty. It’s the same thing really, you invest in businesses that don’t harm animals and so you’re doing your part even if at the end of the day the slaughter houses are booming.
While I certainly agree that it’s comical to expect a company to 100% support your beliefs, I’m also in favor of not using a company if the beliefs of said company are completely contrary to yours. That’s why I’m not using stuff like google, microsoft, amazon etc.
Voting with your wallet is a very good thing and I fully support people who do it.
If it was just a political stance, I’d agree with you, but…it’s fucking Trump. That goes further than “Oh, it’s just a minor political difference” to me.
Where do we draw the line?
I thought kissing the ass of Trump was our canary.
People feel like the only vote they have that matters anymore is the one they can make with their wallet. You can’t tell people their politics are separate from their products when the CEO’s control the government through donations and lobbying.
been using https://migadu.com/ for a few months now and its pretty great
I use mailbox.org its pretty sweet
I can vouch. Been a user for years with multiple accounts.
They actually seem like an ethical company above just one that values user privacy.
Wow. Sweet tantrum. Hope it pays dividends. I’ve seen enough, Lemmy. G’bye.
Bye!
For what it’s worth, it would be worthwhile if more moderate people (which I suppose you are) were in lemmy. You can just block people if you don’t want to see content from them.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14512485
I wouldn’t say they’re moderate.
Your last straw is someone being against fascism? Seems like you arent a big loss
Why treat Proton like it’s the work of a single person rather than a large team?
Imagine it like a pyramid scheme.
CEO’s get to decide what to do with the money the company earns. The workers dont.
And is there a risk he may invest money further into fascism?
of course
I wonder what kind of “republican” changes to Proton would be possible to put forth without angering the majority of users or defeating the point of Proton altogether. That’s why I don’t see this as a prelude to anything major. What do you think?
donating money to parties/candidates is a common thing for companies and wealthy individuals to do
Good point. It can translate to direct money donations to a political party.
Because its not an unimportant person praising the fascists.
Companies are monarchies.
A single person speaks for that company and drives the direction of that company the workers making the product have little to no say in the overarching ideals and principles of that product.
I don’t think any CEO I’ve ever worked for speaks for me…
No but your work progresses their goals
Seems to me like the issue is that CEOs exist, not that this particular one has some personal opinion.q
Both can be true. CEOs influence the direction the company takes.
Money talks and in that case, lots of people in this thread don’t want to encourage a company that endorse a fascist. Which is legitimate.
There was a reply from the official proton handle on mastodon doubling down on the Andy’s take.
But wouldn’t it be more productive to talk to Proton about this obviously crappy PR instead of descending into unnecessary cancelling of a perfectly good service?
And how do we know none of the other services also have fascists in their midst? This circle could go on forever until no services are left.
Asking seriously.
I did. Their reply was generic and useless. “Yen said on Reddit it’s his personal opinion.” Yet he used the Proton admin account to spread his opinion (based on fake news).
Fair enough! So what do you hope to accomplish with this action? Like, goal wise, is it to change Proton’s stance? Or is it more about being an ethical consumer?
It’s so I hopefully get the right answer so I don’t have to switch to an alternative for my calender (just switched from Google), my mail, vpn and password manager. I am a paying customer since May 2019. I was happy with Proton and what they stand for, their CEO is now ruining everything. “We want to switch to a foundation so our goal will be preserved.” Sure… Spreading fake news and taking a political stance in the US, while at the same time claiming to be Swiss neutral. Why do almost all techbros have to become evil now Trump is becoming president again. Even Swiss foundations.
Yeah I can understand that completely.
I have been on Opalstack since they started. I like them. I pay for hosting monthly. I’ve self-hosted several apps there (or tried to, sometimes; I couldn’t make everything work all the time). Nextcloud is dodgy; I like it, but it’s a pain in the ass for someone like me (not a dev, not a coder) to deal with the almost inevitable problems every 2 or 3 times I need to upgrade. And I’ve never been able to get an office suite working well. Much of this could be because I’m trying to run NC on shared hosting; even opalstack’s support doesn’t fix all of that.
Email: opalstack has email. I use it. I don’t actually know what service it is, but I have three or four mailboxes linked to a couple of domain names I own, and several hundred email addresses* Thunderbird does great with IMAP on my laptop, desktop, and phone, with opalstack as the server.
*lots of emails because when I sign up for something I create a new email address just in case they sell my stuff and I start to get spam.
Nextcloud is much, much less trouble by using AIO docker master container. I’ve ran Nextcloud for almost a decade, and the AIO is by far the lowest hassle way to do it.
I don’t think that works on shared hosting (at least not without similar workarounds and tweaks), but I hear that the AIO method and snap both work really well if you have root access on the machine.
There’s plenty of alternatives for mail out there. As for me, what happened isn’t enough for me to consider leaving Proton for another service. There isn’t anywhere else that offers all the services Proton does for $8/month.
This may sound drastic but really I think the only move for Proton is fire Andy. They’re a non-profit, the board need to step in. He has single-handedly cost the company both current and potential customers by just not being smart enough to keep his mouth shut. This makes him an idiot, and an idiot as CEO is not a good look (see: anything musk)
Andy Yen really dropped the ball especially because he hasn’t done anything significant to really establish trust in his leadership and the biggest thing he does is tank the company image.
Dude had the easiest job in the world — shut up, look smart, pretend to care and delegate. Instead, he jumps head first into left vs right of US politics on Twitter of all places 🤡
I’m not going to change from Proton because of this, but what you’re suggesting is probably not a bad idea. CEOs are and should be easy to replace and mistakes like this are pretty standard reason why CEOs get booted.
edit removed some rather incriminating, unverified claims about Andy Yen
So… any petition or open letter to sign?
I think you need to be in Proton’s Board of Directors to have any effect on this. Perhaps if some of those guys are your friend?
https://proton.me/about/team
I just got settled for fuck’s sake
I just requested a refund yesterday. I upped 20 days ago.
It’s still the same Proton
This reads like an angry response to what Proton has been doing very recently.
Take a moment to reflect how you started to use their services. Really think about what you thought at the time about them being the right service for your needs.
Did anything really change for you, other than thinking your porn download history is now as safe as Nazi gold in Switzerland?
Take the next step, and don’t look back.
disroot
depending on your politics, autistici
You can already try to disroot deeznuts
Thanks for sharing the second one
“Proton? Why the fuck would he be mad at a WINE fork…?”
“… OH THE MAIL-”
I always forget there is a hyped for-profit mail service using the same name as the game compatibility layer.
It’s, as of recently, a nonprofit.
I don’t trust them with that. They have an extremely limited free tier that indirectly “forces” users to upgrade to one of the paid tiers. The one that is least limited and reasonably priced is “Proton Unlimited” for ten bucks a month to be paid annually. Plus: you cannot even use a mail client of your choice without installing an extra application for that.
You could easily selfhosting the cloud stuff. If you don’t want to selfhost a mail server you could use one from a mail provider. Don’t know how it’s done internationally, but here in Germany are quite a few companies that provide you with either a domain forwarding service for your selfhosted stuff, or a good and cheap mail server solution for a fraction of what Proton wants to have, and I highly doubt they need ca. $120 a year per user to offer a handful of mail aliasev and allowing you to create folders in your mailbox.
And you’re not even arbitrarily limited - and your data never leaves your private environment.
This is literally me, except I left a comment here earlier today and when I saw the thread for a second time when looking at a reply, I also thought it was about Proton alla Wine.
Nextcloud is an amazing alternative to things like google suite or Office365. You can.self-host it or rent space on a server with nextcloud preinstalled. It integrates things like file storage, online office, podcast, rss feed reader, photo albums, etc. There’s litteraly hundreds of apps that can easily be installed. I was a big user of the G suite, made the change last year and couldn’t be happier. It’s much more powerful than I was expecting and no evil gafam get access to my data.
Agree it’s amazing. A one stop shop. Not encrypted by design I think but this is surrly feasable for the technically skilled
it’s great but doesn’t cover email, that you have to do yourself/with a provider
definitely. I run one on my own server. It doesn’t do mail though.