I left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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I'm backing stuff up and waiting to see how this plays out until March before deciding. The only reason I didn't immediately quit is because it's just one board member and he's not American, so I'm leaving towards him not understanding how bad things were getting. It was also before the Musk Nazi salute so he gets that tiny benefit of the doubt. Still, it was insanely dumb what he did, and did erode a lot of trust in Proton.
I was never on Proton. Back when I decided to degoogle my digital life I landed on a short list between proton and tutamail. So I deep dive into both. When I researched Proton it stank of corporate technobro culture. The crypto wallet, trying to be an everything platform/brand, style over functionality programming, the communications. It all reeked of corpo bs.
Their only pro was operating from Swiss legal protections. So I landed on Tuta. Not because they were any particularly better, but because they were focused on doing one thing and one thing only at a time. They were also more focused on features over marketing buzzwords which I liked.
I've left and canceled my paid subscription. Addy.io + Posteo. I like it way better.
Addy.io absolutely amazing.
I also left my plan, even refunded the amount, since my renewal was set on January 1st.
Main reason I used Proton was their VPN, especially their wide range of servers and countries helped me. But now I don't need that many individual country servers anymore, so I settled to Mullvad, mainly because their prices are very competitive and they are considered "trusted" (even though I kinda miss port forwarding, I'd rather not have it, than trust in AirVPN or other smaller services).
I used their mail for a little while, so migration was rather simple. I currently test out Posteo, when I am happy with them, I might stick to them.
Same with Drive, I didn't use them, mainly because they do not have proper Linux support (no, rclone isn't sufficient).
Thankfully I didn't use them as my password manager (and definitely not as a crypto wallet service) :D
I use Azire for vpn since they own their servers and let you use a plain old wireguard client. Before that I used Mullvad but I need port forwarding and a few sites I frequent blocked it for some reason. Only use Proton’s VPN for less sensitive stuff and being able to exit in lots of countries. The inconsistency in all the apps’ UIs sort of irks me, and the lack of a drive client for Linux is a negative.
I only recently finished migrating all my email to Proton so I’m probably leaving it for now. But I’m eyeballing replacements. His comments on X seemingly sucking up to Trump weirds me out… especially after the shock and awe shit show happening this week
Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.
Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.
Fair warning: Tuta's email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that's permanent). I didn't have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.
I do think people are over-reacting to Andy's words and assigning him political views he didn't express. He didn't endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn't "go full MAGA" or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public--under an official business account no less--shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn't willing to say publicly.
Another factor in my decision: Proton's privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn't notify you about.
That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don't think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you're trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn't ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don't keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren't going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.
The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn't leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a "do better". There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That's the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they're more likely to put the effort into leaving.
You know what would be really great? If Thunderbird actually had its own email service (@thunderbird.net) and not just a client. When they were switching K9 Mail over to Thunderbird mobile, it seemed like there might have been the slightest hint on their blog that they were at least considering it (or maybe I dreamed it). Might be a good source of income for Mozilla too...🤔
Me +wife were seriously considering switching to proton, but we had been "considering" for like half a year. So while the transfer now has been officially put on hold indefinitely, that's in practice no different from how it was before :)
Have considered tuta but there are several reasons I'm not sold on that service - primarily that they manage to give me (who isn't a techie!) the impression (I might be wrong...) of a walled garden where all the benefits /convenience of the service evaporate (??) as soon as you need to talk to a non-tuta user.(??)
From your description it sounds like the feature you might be thinking of as walled-garden-ing is end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) emails, which they call "confidential". The idea is that you can encrypt a message and send it to someone. The message they receive is actually just a link to a publicly-accessible page that Tuta hosts. You give the other person a password that they can enter on that page to read the email you sent and respond to it. If your recipient is also using Tuta, though, when you send an encrypted email it just shows up in their inbox like a regular email.
This is the standard way to handle secure emails, and it's actually a limitation of the email protocol. The way you would send an encrypted message to someone on another email server is to encrypt the email with your recipient's public key. Then the message goes to their email inbox like a regular email and they can use their private key to decrypt it (which is what Tuta does if you're sending an encrypted email to another Tuta user--they already have the recipient's public key). Email servers don't have a standard way to send each other public keys for accounts, so if you want to encrypt an email you either have to get the recipient's public key yourself and tell your email software to encrypt the message with it, or have your provider send a password protected link.
I actually just switched to Tuta. You can still get and receive normal unencrypted emails. The encryption is optional and not enabled by default. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other yet on the service as a whole. They just added the ability to import emails exported from another service, which is usually something email providers do pretty early on. Currently it's only available at the $8/month tier, but it's speculated that they'll roll it out to the $3/month tier once it's stable. That'll be a non-starter for a lot of people. The client UI is simple but functional. It was easy to set up my domain so I don't have to go into each account and update my email address. Yeah, no complaints so far, but also nothing that blows me away. There's a free tier if you wanted to just poke around.
I canceled the night of and moved to a combination of Mailbox and Tuta (trying to diversify a little). I also provided a colorful reason for terminating to make sure they knew exactly why.
So far they each have their quirks, but overall I like them. I also set up two domains for email so that the next switch won't be as jarring (since I can just keep using the domain addresses).
I already used Mullvad for VPN, so that was a non-issue.
I see a few people who don't want to switch due to the hassle it would take with changing email addresses, presumably because they use one of the @proton.me email domains. Get your own email domain! It's super cheap (if you choose one of the new TLDs, it can be as low as few dollars a year), the setup isn't really hard - you just change a few DNS values, and that's basically it - you can use whatever email you want that ends with your domain. It might take a while to slowly replace all your @proton.me emails with your domain one, but if you're not in a hurry and change any old mail you see during your day-to-day activities, you'll eventually be done with it, and you can set up mail forwarding to your domain for mail that arrives to your old @proton.me address.
And if you ever need to move to a different provider, you just change the DNS records again to a new provider, and your email will start coming to the new one immediately.
No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it's systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.
honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton's goals and actions don't change I'm fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it's one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I'm wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.
As a Linux person, I, too, am somewhat tired of being treated like a second-class user. Having no Linux client for Drive is a real pain.
This is the single-most annoying thing with Proton for me. Give us a Linux client for drive already... 😭
Supposedly rclone can work with Proton Drive, but for me at least, it seemed way too complicated to set up.
Yes, I tried to set it up before, but wasn't successful either. So I decided it's not worth putting hours of work into it, to make it work in some hacky way that will break down anyway any chance it gets.
Cancelled auto-renew. I have a year and half to find alternatives. I'll not support this company anymore.
I've been using Fastmail for over 10 years now and I love it. I haven't seen it mentioned a single time as an alternative.
I honestly wasn't going to switch, but him being backed up by the official account was iffy. Even still, I wasn't necessarily making moves to switch. But I tried to use a new card to pay for my Proton subscription, and it wouldn't verify. I eventually had to make a Paypal just to pay my bill and avoid losing access to my account. So I kinda decided, "fuck it, they can't be that shitty of a company and get my money still."
I was kinda planning to switch, just not urgently. But now, I hope to be fully moved over to Tuta Mail in the next few weeks.
They probably had too many chargebacks and lost their payment processor.
I'm grandfathered in to the old pricing for Proton Unlimited. I ain't cancelling until they pry the service from my cold, dead hands.
I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.
The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.
You don't have to self-host email (which is a pain) with a custom domain. Most of the providers will let you point your domain's email at their servers, with a few DNS entries. The major (IMO) benefit of that is that your email address is decoupled from your email provider, so changing providers in the future doesn't require you to tell all your contacts.
Thank you! This helps, and while it doesn't solve the issue of the @ being recognizable, it does solve a lot of issues.
You would need to register your domain with someone who offers privacy from Whois lookups (they all should). Your contact information will be discoverable with a subpoena. A mail relay like Duck or Firefox would be an additional layer of anonymity but idk how they will respond to law enforcement
Mullvad VPN has worked well for me.
I downgraded from the Ultimate plan because I don't really need the VPN. It hasn't exactly achieved much because now I just have additional credit on my account.
If the CEO hasn't been replaced by the time my annual subscription comes up for renewal I'll migrate elsewhere. It's a pain because their email and calendar are half decent but I'm really not impressed with the company's failure to take responsibility.
I don't even know what he has said.
He said unnecessarily political things in a tweet which don't match the experiences of many people, at the exact worst moment possible. Then he doubled down on his statement with an official company account, which he later edited after there was backlash. The original comment. He's promised to post from a personal account in the future. In that same post he stated that "while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and therefore should not have been made".
In further discussions he described his political leanings as "probably closest to European center-left parties. But again, that's a massive generalization/simplification. Where that puts me on the American spectrum, I have no idea". That's not really part of the drama, but can be taken to imply that despite working with US legislators in the past and touting this work in his responses, he may not have fully understood the current political climate or party dynamics if he doesn't know which US party he more closely identifies with. Another interpretation could be that he knows full well and doesn't want to say either way because making a statement of partisan support is what put him in the hot water in the first place.
I linked original sources so you can do your own reading and come to your own conclusions. Personally I bounce between believing that he stepped in something he didn't mean to and he genuinely doesn't support either party, and thinking that he's too clever a man to not understand, especially since he has directly worked with US legislators on privacy issues and he doubled down in the comments after the general response was critical of his original tweet.
I don’t see what’s controversial here. This just seems like an independent thinker who evaluates issues on a case-by-case basis rather than blindly adopting the views of any one group as a package deal.
The tweet where he said Trump's pick was great and that people forget that the Republican party is the one that fought against Big Tech, blah blah blah.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt for a second and say he isn't familiar with why that isn't true since he's not American.
He is publicly tweeting something supporting Trump.
There's a broad spectrum of people who are flawed which I'm 100% fine with acknowledging publicly that they did something right. But there is a line where it doesn't matter anymore.
An extreme example: if I thought of something Hitler did that was good for the German people, should I tweet about it?
No. Because I don't want to come off as supporting Hitler.
Trump and his administration are causing so much awful shit. The wording of Andy's message wasn't "Trump sucks but just FYI there's one small thing he did right". His wording was simply all positive, leaving the important context that Trump is a fascist out entirely.
I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy's comments and doubling down. I feel like I'm giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I'll consider those when they happen.
I think leaving would be an over reaction.
Edit: I hope all of you downvoters don’t use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, Android, iOS, Amazon, etc, etc. Otherwise, you’re a bunch of hypocrites. Every single major tech CEO gave Trump $1 million and SAT at his inauguration.
Eh if quitting or stopping use of products and services required perfect circumstances then nothing would be quit, and you might as well be saying nobody should do anything because of being labeled a hypocrite. Pretty much the same as arguing stanchly for apathy and inaction.
Realistically though people cut what they can if a decent substitute presents itself. So when those rare opportunities come I say take it and quit products you might have issue with. Real life doesn't often present perfect gift wrapped hypocrite free opportunities, so if there's an exit take it. Better than inaction because of the hypocrite label dictating you doing nothing. A tiny step is better than none.
They did do some damage control. But it was a pretty terrible thing for the CEO to say.
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I've switched from Proton Drive and Calendar to Nextcloud, which is an upgrade.
I've switched from Proton Pass to Vaultwarden, which works just as well for me.
I've switched from Standard Notes to Memos, which has also been an improvement for me considering my notes needs are pretty basic and Memos fits perfectly.
That leaves Mail, Simple Login, and VPN. I have alternatives lined up with Tuta, addy.io, and Mullvad, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I would be paying more than I am now with Proton (2 year plan) and it would be a massive pain to switch email providers.
I'm considering staying with Proton for only those services, but on thin ice. If they fuck up again, I'm absolutely out.
I may end up switching anyway however. This situation has left a bad taste in my mouth, and if I have the motivation and time to deal with migrating one day in the near future, I might just do it regardless. We'll see.
I am still with proton since the owners being pricks doesn't change the reasons why I like them for my email: They have made it clear what they will and won't give to authorities and I can act accordingly.
That said, I did look into going mullivad+tuta but decided against it. Since tuta requires you to use their desktop client if you want an "offline" copy of their emails and that just seems like a mess when they inevitably do something shitty and I need to wait for "support" to get back to me for why I can't download my emails and go elsewhere. Whereas I can just keep the bridge running and open thunderbird every week or two with proton.
can you post their reply here on lemmy?
would be interesting to know what they have to say
Personally I switched off of VPN to mullvad at least, and am looking into self hosting bitwarden and using tuta (and now addy.io too thanks to a comment here). Honestly I'd been considering switching for a bit anyway just to be less reliant on a single service for everything, so this kinda validated that since even if this specifically isn't a dealbreaker something else could definitely end up as one. Even if I don't fully move off of proton because moving emails is so annoying, it will still be nice to at least have some other options set up.
i was using both proton and tuta, now i privilege tuta.
I moved many people from google to proton, from now on people i convince will move to tuta.
you don't move in a week, you decide to move and start modifying your @ on all the sites and offices that contact you through that address. One day, you realize that it's been months since you last needed your older address and you delete.
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For email, I landed on Tuta as being the closest in feature parity and signed up for the €3/mo plan. Been pretty happy so far and was pleasantly surprised to see both the email and calendar apps were available on F-Droid. Personal bonus for me was they also run on renewable energy.
So far the only con I've found was lack of support for +aliases (e.g. [email protected]) but the 15 additional email addresses help to offset that.
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I'm moving to Tuta, and bought some domains to use as custom domains. Accidentally clicked yearly instead of monthly in Tuta (cuz I don't want such a long commitment yet), and it doesn't let me change it to monthly, so I have to message support and ask them to change it back to monthly, 24 hours has passed and still waiting for a response... Proton usually responds within 24 hours... 🤷♂️
Edit: In like 12 hours, it'd be 48 hours... so... 👀
I sent another email to make sure it went through.
If their response takes longer than like a week, I'm gonna have to look for something else...
I'm in pretty deep on the email side to the point where leaving would take days or weeks of effort. I'm not above making that effort if I think it's necessary though. I do not yet think it's necessary.
I did just start using my second Proton product, Standard Notes, around two months ago. I'm not honestly sure if I'll renew it when it expires - we'll see how the year goes. I honestly have very little expectation that Proton is enshittifying or turning evil. I'll be very surprised if it becomes a recurring pattern for them.
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I was looking at Proton for mail and calendar right around the time the Andy thing kicked off. I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on Proton due to their fairly high pricing. I ultimately decided on Tuta for mail and calendar, and I have no issues using their native/desktop apps. I am still forwarding everything from my Gmail account as I slowly work through changing my email on key services. So far so good.
The one issue I had with Tuta is no ability to import mail unless you are at the highest priced tier. I’m on the middle one so no import. What I did instead was just download a copy of my Gmail to an MBOX file, and I have that on my desktop and access it with Thunderbird (read only) as needed. This was fine for me as I don’t have much mail of significance.
Switching was a small action, but one that made me feel immediately better, like I did something concrete in opposition to the rapidly enshittifying tech universe.
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