Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.


I said this before, will say it again: do not migrate to another subscription service.
People went through all the trouble to migrate from Google to Proton, then now they must migrate from Proton to whatever else, and the cycle will repeat again.
Subscription services, cloud software, they all strip you of agency and control. You don’t have direct access to the files, you don’t control the GUI, they are filled with proprietary formats, you are at their hands if they decide to change something you like, or pricing, or if they simply go nuts.
Keep your things in your computer. Need they synced? SyncThing will do that for you on any device imaginable.
Totally disagree. Self hosting a mail server is a world of pain, and not all subscription services are equal.
If you’re a masochist try self-hosting your own email service. Otherwise, shop around and find a service that is compatible with your threat model.
Hosting your own email is actually not that hard. It takes a fair amount of initial setup but if you do it right, it is very stable and functional. Email servers are very mature, and things like Postfix hardly need anything once set up. Getting a static IP is the hard part, but if you run it on a VPS with a good IP you can just hang onto it.
Filtering traffic via (e.g.) pfblocker feeds and spamassassin kills most spam, and it is awesome to just create and destroy your own mailboxes at will.
Nah let them find out. Leave proton and host their own mail server
I give it a month max
The vast majority of people don’t know the difference between 2FA and passkeys, and you want them to manage their own self hosted solutions for everything? Yeah, keep repeating this I guess…
You might as well move out to the mountains and live off grid and pretend like that’s a real solution.
I didn’t mention self hosting nor do I think it’s necessary, unless you consider any service running in your desktop as “self hosting”.
People need/want/are used to active sync. For that one either needs a true self-hosted solution and/or a service that requires opening port(s) on the firewall/router, which most people either have no idea how to do or can’t due to ISP lockdown. Self-hosting can very quickly turn into a 2nd job and not everyone wants that. Or they have no required techical knowledge and no desire or time to learn. Plus, you still have to set up proper backups, even if the service is just running on your desktop. Unless, of course, you’re fine with a single point of failure.
On the topic of mail hosting, as someone who works in IT and self-hosts a whole stack of things: I do not ever want to self-host my email. Personally, I was considering just getting another domain for email and switching backend services as needed, but I liked the package Proton offered, so I chose that instead. I might need to rethink that domain option, but at this rate, soon no backend service will be safe from fascists and/or AI.
It is if you want to access it from anywhere on any device. I know SyncThing makes that a lot easier, but not exactly a set and forget kind of thing.
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they replied to me, where i said “I used to self host those”, so it’s fair they suggested to selfhost some other service
That’s fair enough, I paid more attention to the “I keep saying this” part.
yes. at least desktop <-> notebook <-> phone. Also I want friends to send me files and vice versa.
I tried that when before i migrated from selfhosted nextcloud to proton. it was pretty annoying to keep running. And I couldnt easily use it to send files to friends. That was some years ago though. maybe things changed idk.
Will SyncThing sync photos from an iPhone to a Linux desktop?
Yes, with Möbius Sync. You’ll have to copy the photos on the iPhone to a directory where Files can see them because of a security thing on Apple’s side, then connect Möbius to the Linux desktop running syncthing, and point Möbius to the photos location in Files to make the share.
That advice is not helpful, though. Most of us used to store passwords on our computer: In our internet browsers. In plain text for anyone to grab. It was the dumbest idea ever and password managers became popular quickly in recent years as more people realized they need to protect their credentials somehow. So no, I genuinely do not believe in just storing passwords somewhere without any safety measures.
So store them in a safe password manager in your computer.
See? You’re almost helpful. But I do have to ask you if that password manager has a name? You see, at this point most people would’ve already given up or just ask ChatGPT or Google AI about it, which in this case would be hypocrite but I digress.
Sure, had you asked about a solution rather than trying to write some sort of gotcha. KeePassXC is a fully complete password manager, better than whatever subscription crap you’d rather push, and it stores everything into an encrypted local db file you control. Now guess what I’d recommend for syncing that file across other devices.