I’m disappointed…I tried to not care about this CEO supporting Trump, but come on…now they ditch Mastodon, tomorrow they close source their clients…I’m losing trust to them, I used to think about them as knights in this capitalist world, but well. As someone once said “You either live and die as a legend, or live long enough to become evil”. I don’t want it to happen but yeah, I guess we all gotta find a good replacement for Proton services, sad but it is what it is.
Of all the fuckin places to move to they chose reddit 😭
Because they can control the dialog on reddit
I have Proton email and will ditch it soon.
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.
One of the “countries” in that list is the whole EU. That makes it practically meaningless when they have countries like Hungary licking they ass day and night.
Some of the initial people involved did their university and post grad studies in the US, so they seem more American than Swiss to me and more chose Switzerland to conduct business after starting the company up after meeting at CERN.
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.
Proton has an API for getting the PGP keys of all their users. I can send any proton user an encrypted email, and I attach my public key to the email (Thunderbird does this by default).
Then the user only has to click the “trust key” button and all their future emails will be encrypted to my PGP key. It’s 1 click for them.
Tutanota has no way to do this. I read why, but its nonsense. PGP for e2ee is better than no e2ee. Tuta is naked and not a replacement for proton.
people were using the vpn to evade reddit bans, but even reddit does not like vpn users anymore.
Aww, is someone booty blasted they can’t control the dialog no more?
I switched to StartMail, I’m officially done with ProtonMail. Are you even kidding me, how just how…
What did they keep?
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)
I’ve never used Proton. I use Njalla
Isn’t Njalla a registrar?
They’re a lot of things.
Drama. Drama. Deama
🤨
Ditches fediverse but still use Xitter?
On top of the trump apointee praise?
Sus 👀
That’s not sus, that’s what anyone ought to expect him to do, because it aligns with his bourgeois interests. Why would he stay on a non-corporate, federated social media platform when he and his bourgeois peers can’t control the narrative?
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.
I think this is right on the money.
Yeah. They can’t get Mastodon moderators to suppress negative publicity like they can on Reddit and other platforms.
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.
if they cant suppress on reddit, they will go to facebook, which give them ability to do alot more.
And considering a lot of people on the internet make comments without being fully informed, the backlash is probably huge.
Hate is spreading a lot quicker than the truth.
However, the original Twitter post and their doubling down are just stupid responses and they shouldn’t have made them.
What is the recent controversy?
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 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.
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”
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
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.
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.
The CEO came out as a fascist
Like Elon Musk recently?
This is just…not accurate.
So Proton ditched Mastodon but is still on Twitter, aka the Nazi cesspool, and Reddit. Both US propaganda platforms with heavy censorship.
Bad, bad move.
I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics (because our government is literally run by nazis now), but this decision isn’t helping; it will fuel and reinforce the negative image already held by those who have canceled their accounts and those who are on the fence.
Proton marketing itself on privacy while recently calling out the danger of tech oligarchs makes their decision to leave Mastodon and keep using Twitter very confusing. Lot of mixed signals.
Makes it harder to defend with the statement the official Proton account made on reddit which they have since then removed and kept editing. Makes you wonder what do they actually believe and if this is their attempt to be apolitical how much are they self censoring their true views on the matter to seem more palatable.
mustve saw how reddit started banning a sht ton of accounts, and its starting to resemble facebook in some form. its all trump propaganda(negative or otherwise which helps him), reddit is censoring hard this month, it looks like its gearing to be bought off, and to encourage traffic from right wingers, because i keep seeing conservative subs being on the front page alot.
I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics
And I could see the point, kind of, even though it strained credulity on substance. He seemed more confused to me than die-hard partisan. But it’s really hard to square what was effectively a blanket statement endorsing R’s with his subsequent comment that it “was not intended to be a political statement” (paraphrase).
And then also the official proton account doubling down on it a day later.
His whole defense hinged on making people believe Gail Slater being on the FTC meant she fought for little tech, but omitted her history leaving to became vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association which is a lobbying group for companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
The Internet Association—a trade group for big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—spent nearly $176,000 to lobby the California legislature last quarter, according to the Washington Post. It is now running misleading ads on social media asking Sacramento lawmakers to weaken the law.
The group claims that surveillance-based advertising technology, which slurps up and broadly spreads consumers’ personal data without their knowledge, should be exempted from the CCPA. In truth, surveillance-based adtech is one of the worst privacy hazards that the law was designed to stop. It also provides little benefit to online publishers, and erodes trust between companies and their consumers.
That medium article that keeps being reposted from some random user with only that one article intentionally omits this work history after the FTC too.
I need to migrate away from Proton ASAP.
And now I’ve ditched Proton. Andy Yen’s comments made me skeptical, but I was still confident that their mission was intact. This move, to a social media platform with a demonstrated willingness to censor non-corporatist views, confirms my fears that they are giving up their principles.
Exactly this. I left after the previous comments but still felt they had integrity. That’s also starting to change
