A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
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).
You know I was like this close to getting proton VPN before this whole thing started. I've been researching for like 6 months to decide which one I was going to switch to. They were on the short list. Bullet dodged.
I'm not on the exit proton bandwagon. All CEOs are awful and I don't have the energy to do the vote-with-your-dollars ethical consumption dance every time we're freshly reminded of that fact. Especially not with the only service out there that packages data integrity, privacy, and ease of use in a complete suite at the level that proton does.
I've said this before and I'll say this a million times again, capitalism is simply not viable. The main mechanism to punish bad business practice (using a different business) also hurts the significantly weaker consumer; meaning it will almost never be used properly.
I point this out here because I agree with your stance and cannot stand the "vote with your wallet" nonsense people pretends works.
This makes it really difficult to navigate the privacy space because eventually a cornerstone like Proton is "corrupted" and we have no way to correct it. We seriously need people thinking about solutions to this problem, or we'll be going nowhere fast.
If you might allow me to disagree with you slightly...
The key to this, as in many things, is balance; in ALL things. Voting with your wallet does work, its a form of influencing and controlling the direction of the capital. It just doesn't work in a long term sense because people stop there; like boycotting. It is hard to boycott a company that has a monopoly on a market that has become a necessity, even if it's only a necessity to a niche community.
The key is, that you spend on smaller businesses, that are closer to the consumer than at large conglomerates. If there is none for the market, create one and encourage people to support your business that doesn't have any political ties yet. For example, I live in a capitol city, and my neighbor a few houses down has started a small chicken coop in their back yard; i began buying my eggs from them as its much cheaper and I don't have to worry about my funds being reallocated in support of something that would harm me or my community as they are a part of my community. Also, I deliver pizza as a third job for a small, mom and pops place and encourage those political minded people to spend money there as the pizza is made with fresh ingredients and made there. Takes a bit longer but we are too small to allocate funds to political matters and organizations; we do small events for the schools in the community but that is about it.
Once said businesses start to grow too big, rinse and repeat. Find another small business and support them. As support dwindles from a company that is growing too large, their options become more and more limited.
This seems not to work due to peoples mindset and preferring convenience over meaningful spending; which is something that I know not how to combat. What say you, friends?
I agree with you, and yeah the convenience factor is in fact a huge problem and is highly exploited. The only thing I saw working are in fact laws to make the switch to another "service" more convenient (e.g. you have a messaging app? your protocol must be open source so that other clients should be possible by law, idk how feasible is this, but u get the idea).
First off, I am happy that your community is functional and that (at least for now) the capitalist structure works for you.
The core of this issue lies in human-nature and incentive-structure. The thing is, majority of people never act as the ideal in any system. In fact most of the time, due to the often strict guidelines of systems, people act in bad faith. What this means is that any system, at all times, will have significant resistance to existing and will need sufficient guardrails to not fall apart. Why bring this up? Because capitalism has no guardrails.
The "start another business" argument is not viable because (unfortunately) most people do not have the capital nor expertise to compete. An extremely high number of people on Earth do not own businesses, and there is a reason for this.
The "rinse wash and repeat" argument also quickly falls apart because:
A significant amount of industries around the world are effective monopolies, there is a reason for this. Low capital pool, low talent pool, high failure rates, and high competition - means that once you make it out of development hell, you are almost always unrivaled and can easily destroy/outlast your competitors.
Since we're here, lets talk about incentive structure. Most people do not have disposable income, those that do are investors. In a system where money is the "goal", the natural result is that the investors will be prioritized. This generally means that the end-user (me and you) are being exploited. Mom and Pop will not save you from the physics of money.
The only thing I've seen "work" is when there is a community of strong moral fiber that refuses to sell out their neighbor. This is why I said I am happy for you, because this is extremely rare.
As for the solution, any answer I give will be bad. This is a complex (not complicated!) issue and requires influential, smart, and rich people to work towards a goal for many years.
That said, I am giving a bad answer anyway. We need a way to "miniaturize" infrastructure, with the end goal being distributed (decentralized) infrastructure. The reason being that we need to decouple the government and monopolies from the market. This is obviously extremely difficult to do, but I think it can be done. We actually have a lot of the tools for this (3d printers, foss, internet, etc) but the direction, knowledge, and polish aren't there.
Proton is a bandage solution to email being hijacked by Google and Microsoft - they used their infrastructure to turn an open protocol (email) into a closed implementation (you cant send email to your buddy without gmail). Proton is a middle ground where they respect us, but are also "in the club". We wouldn't need them if emails could simply be sent from my router to your router (tor has something like this).
I'm not too sure it's as difficult as you are making it out to be. We see something similar with "black wall street" where black communities were committed to keeping their capital within their communities and black owned companies. We can even see this with the Amish and how they have survived as a community. I'm not completely sure if you can keep 100% of the capital within certain communities; but in a similar sense, we can at least attempt to be more meaningful with how and where we spend our money. The tech community chooses which company they support and do "business" with, similarly with fashion and many other things that aren't completely necessary. I feel like that would at least be a start. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will correcting the public's spending habits. But it has been done and can be done again. There just needs to be the right incentive; to which, I'm not sure what that would be.
This is a case where I believe history has shown us the answer. A system reliant on humans doing the right thing is not sustainable nor viable, fullstop. Even if we were to corral this together in 10 years it would just break 10 years later (see 1960s-1980s) - which is not worth investing in.
Black Wall Street is a particularly bad example because of how it was both physically and systematically destroyed. They acted in good faith to capitalism and were destroyed by bad faith actors - something that capitalism has no answer for (as stated previously). The Amish are a not a great example either considering their population is reliant on the ebb&flow of large scale capitalism too; they use toiletries, washing machines, etc while still being technologically behind.
There is no "right incentive" in any system not focused on community. That means there currently exists no established economic system that will help us. This is why I said we need smart and practical people working on it; because if not we're going to be in really big trouble this century.
Bringing it back to privacy and tech, we are too poor and weak to afford creating new cornerstones every year. When Proton (and most recently Mozilla) rots, we have no recourse. Shifting chairs on the Titanic (moving from Proton to Tuta) is not a real solution, we need real structural changes.
Techies interested in privacy and fairness is just another target/focus group to be marketed to..
But even given that every company sucks(eventually) and every ceo is an asshole. there's something to be said about about spreading out and e.g. using proton over gmail and other google services.they might both suck, but at least if it's spread out, there's not one asshole ceo that controls all our stuff at once. You can't vote with your wallet, but preventing monopolies (the natural end game of a free market) by supporting smaller alternatives can still be worthwile. Not that it solves the underlying issues, but i think it can at least slow the decay a bit.
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.
There are a lot of advantages to the fediverse, but privacy really isn’t one of them.
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.
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
With ActivityPub specifically, I'm aware. Yet privacy-conscious people tend to congregate there as well, which was my point.
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.
It’s engaging, though.
If it draws eyeballs, Reddit admins are happy with it, long term health be damned. That’s someone else’s problem, once they exit with a truck of cash.
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.
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.
The message was on Xitter from Andy Yen, but it was highlight on Mastodon by Jonah from Privacyguides.
The official Proton account also tried to defend Andy Yen on Mastodon (and later deleted it).
Here the link to the thread on Mastodon.
Proton is dead
fuck proton. finally started moving to it from gmail like a month ago. then the ceo thing happened, now this. good thing i only changed email to a few places so i can immediately steer away...
Any alternatives?
I found this site useful. The list of alternatives is very large.
From my looking around at other info and advice, I'd say that Posteo is the best one if you don't have custom domains; and that mailbox.org or possibly Tuta mail is best if do need a custom domain. Tuta is probably best if you need it to be free.
Another solid option not on that list is fastmail.fm (which is Australian).
I suggest Mullvad as an alternative to Protons VPN services.
Yeah, plenty of good VPN alternatives. Not so much for email though if you want encryption.
I get tired of being so right all of the time
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, is this 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 the scope of our current 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.
This is good news. It means we aren't monitizeable enough.
At least we know where their loyalties actually lie, now.
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