You guys know you don't have to follow businesses on social media, right‽ Like, it's all just different flavors of their own advertisements, and you can just not interact.
Privacy focused company move off privacy respecting service and suggest following them on privacy nightmare service. Are they trying to kill any trust in their own company?
Awh. Little babies couldn't handle the heat from their own customers. Good riddance.
This is unexpected, as they had around 50k subscribers on Mastodon, and mirroring posts is super easy.
1000% this. It's easy to mirror, so the idea that "it's too hard, boo hoo" is cover for something else. Given the recent diatribes by the head, this just seems like more indication that Proton is going to play ball with authoritarians (or at least ultracapitalists, who are bosom buddies with the authoritarians).
It's not just the resources to mirror posts, it's also the resources to keep up with communicating with the community, answer questions, maintain a positive presence. It's not trivial.
I do sort of agree that it's insane for any privacy company to be emphasizing Reddit over Mastodon. If anything, the limited resources should motivate them shutting down Reddit and keeping Mastodon. But it's not as totally stupid an explanation as it might seem.
It's also notable that Reddit's features make it a lot easier to communicate with tons of people in a genuine way, with minimal effort (since it's good at surfacing high-voted comments and letting you engage with those people). As well as making it easy to silence anyone who is saying anything you don't want them to say, of course.
it's also the resources to keep up with communicating with the community, answer questions, maintain a positive presence
This is a fair point, and I think you came to that thoughtfully. Would that you were in charge of things instead.
Here's my counterpoint: they aren't obligated to stop posting on Mastodon to focus on comments on Reddit or BlueSky or whatever. They can still post wherever they want but make it clear that they will no longer respond to comments on Mastodon; I follow several accounts that do this, explicitly or implicitly. That's not the choice they made, however.
They're supposed to be governed by the Proton Foundation, with the mission: "Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world." But moves like this don't seem to be in line with that mission, especially when you look at all the options.
They chose to leave Mastodon and reduce/restrict their online presence, and all the evidence I have seems to point to this being a political move and not merely a strategic one.
Time will tell if that's true, but this should raise eyebrows for anyone who cares about data privacy.
Yeah. At best, it is clueless.
I think it's maybe possible that they have a thriving community on Reddit, and not much interaction with people on Mastodon, and they can't afford to invest the time to pay someone to maintain both, and so some middle-manager who's not exactly a tech and privacy expert decided to go with the more active one.
You're completely right though. Even in that super-charitable fantasy scenario, it would have been better to shutter the Reddit community, explain to the thriving community why they would be better served by a different platform, and keep going on Mastodon even if it's something like 5 people.
Is this because everyone gave them shit about their CEO’s breathless praise for a tyrant?
Glad i left proton.
Let's hope they consolidate their social media presence further and stop posting on most of their other profiles as well.
It's their call anyway, as is anyone else's to keep using their services or not. I don't think most of these companies' use of their official social media profiles benefit anyone, and it's certainly not a meaningful enough news for the echo they're getting. Anyone truly interested in whatever Proton AG is doing will probably have a Proton account and undoubtedly receive frequent emails from them. Any stunts made by community managers representing them are just ephemeral noise.
Proton the privacy company... "follow us on reddit"?
I think I'll cancel my services with them now. Thanks for making it easy. Idiots.
I don't use their mail much, but this will get me to switch vpn to mullvad. I just wish the price was similar, proton had some sales to make it fairly cheap.
RIP, another one bites the Drumpf
Can someone recommend a VPN that is GUI like Proton VPN for Linux? Email I've seen plenty of so the options are fresh on the mind. Thank you! :)
Windscribe
Thank you! I'm going to look into it! :)
I think this is the last strike for me, where do you go from Proton, I know for vpns I'll likely be looking at mullvad, but what about passwords/email/calendar/drive?
I quite liked the setup for creating individual email addresses per service and used that heavily, which I assume will make this transition painful.
Passwords I would recommend Bitwarden or KeePass (both of which are in the PrivacyGuides wiki, particularly usefull for KeePass where there are different clients depending on OS)
Email / contacts / calendar I am still struggling on to be quite honest. I am debating right now on Mailbox.org + EteSync OR just using Posteo.de (while it has some security regressions compared to Mailbox.org, it has encrypted contacts and calendar). To be quite honest though the options available in this space are quite frustrating, it is really hard to find a solution that allows for interoperability / data portability as well as E2EE / elevated security.
Posteo.de has email, contacts, and calendar. You can use Filen.io for cloud storage.
Tuta has catch all addresses, meaning you can use any email on your domain and it will go into your inbox. You don't even need to "create" it if the option is enabled - it just takes anything sent your domain and drops it into your inbox. For passwords, you can't beat Bitwarden/Vaultwarden. Tuta has a calendar (but I don't really use it, I use self hosted WebDAV instead). I've not needed a cloud drive (I have a NAS and nextcloud) so I can't really suggest anything for that.
i wonder if they are getting paid resources to move to reddit/meta only
I hate how volatile everything is. I think 2025 will be the year we see what companies and countries shake out. It's too early to see where all the cards will fall.
Now it is easy to decide whether Proton is viable or not. Not their first strike. Hopefully users now know what their philosophy is
I hope they come back. These other platforms are getting enshittier and enshittier by design.
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