cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25445621
How did the transition go? Do you like the new service(s) so far?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you pay for two email providers?
Proton’s free plan is definitely more than good enough to slowly migrate off without paying for pro imo. I used it for my main email for the longest time and the only thing I even noticed was the no autodeleting of old trashed emails.
I was just curious since they said they used both providers and then privileged tuta. Would assume they don’t mean providers should feel privileged because someone uses their services for free.
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 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.
They did do some damage control. But it was a pretty terrible thing for the CEO to say.
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.
But he’s practically a nazi! He basically killed six million Jews! How could you support him?
Wait, you must be a nazi too!
Nobody says that, don’t be an idiot
I’ll be as much of an idiot as I want, thank you very much.
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.
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.
Cancelled auto-renew. I have a year and half to find alternatives. I’ll not support this company anymore.
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
Port forwarding or nothing for me. Do you just… Go without now?
