Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton’s trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.
I really dislike these commercial “private” solutions to surveilance issues we have but people always seem to prefer them because of strong marketing around.
I was using proton pass but I would like to move on. Is there a good open source password manager that is secure and hosted locally?
Sad news :-/
At least we have !protonprivacy@lemmy.world but they’re not on it I believe
Honestly I would be fine if they just setup some kind of mirror so their posts would show up across different platforms. The biggest issue with then not using mastodon is just not being informed of what is going on. They don’t need to engage with people on mastodon just setup some kind of bridge.
Yup, no sorry. Only bots left in reddit, have fun!
Honest, stupid question: Why exactly is this such a big deal to so many of you? (I don’t use Mastodon.)
Proton recently got shot in the foot when one of their board members said some stuff that made it sound like he was somehow not certain that fascists are bad for privacy. The guy responded and clarified and made some good points…and still very clearly did not realize or did not feel it important to mention or even imply that fascists are very definitely bad for privacy. This is still post-record-scratch for Proton.
So leaving what’s basically the only social media of the future, such as it is, and sticking it out in the garbage heaps, makes two data points that make a line that goes in the direction of “definitely going to enshittify”. It’s possible this could be wrong, because two data points isn’t huge, but these are also things that were extremely easy to get right, and require an oddly large amount of effort to fuck up like they have.
Thanks for the reply! I was only aware of the CEO’s X comments regarding Trump’s politics. I JUST moved away from Google and have been quite happy with Proton, especially Mail and Pass.
To me, the federated social network (Fediverse, which Mastodon is one portal into) offers some distinct advantages for pluralism. No single entity can control the whole discourse. When you don’t agree with your mods, you can go elsewhere without losing your connections with people: just move to a different instance.
Furthermore it’s not controlled by corporations, so there is no incentive of trying to spread things like the plague just to get you addicted and make as much money.
In practice the design of the Fediverse leaves some problems open (notably, moving between servers comes at a cost to the online identity you built, and getting bootstrapped if you don’t have real-life connections who are interested is more difficult) and it even creates some interesting problems of its own. But all in all it’s better already than the mono-idea, “there is one norm everyone should stick to” culture we see on commercial offerings.
yet another reason to use mastodon, because they can’t control it yet.
What do you mean?
They moderate their own subreddit and can censor things. There has been some drama about them deleting some posts and stuff, and in general, them moderating their subreddit makes it so that you’re less likely to express what you really feel
I believe
Can you even use Reddit if you’re running Proton’s VPN? I know Reddit has been actively blocking other VPNs (eg Mullvad) for some time.
Yes they have a stealth feature that is helpful for detecting a VPN
I wish VPS providers didn’t commonly block email ports. Self hosting seems like the only way to stay in control
It’s understandable though, they just don’t want to deal with email spammers.
Makes me glad that I procrastinated on switching over, I guess I’ll just ride out my current NordVPN subscription and switch over to Mullvad?
Almost makes me afraid to ask the community, what exactly is wrong with Nord? 😅
Unless you never want to torrent, I would say to not use mullvad, you can’t forward a port with them (same with NordVPN). There are plenty of VPNs that don’t log and allow port forwarding. I use AirVPN.
I’ve not encountered any issues filling up my NAS with torrented Linux ISOs via NordVPN?
My priority for a VPN has just been no logging and the ability to ‘travel’ internationally… so if there the case, no need to rush out and switch then?
https://lemm.ee/post/56692320/18526252
A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.
So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.
As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn’t work.
Yeah, speeds are far greater with port forwarding. But, if you’re not in a hurry, I suppose it’s nbd
Looks like I’m leaving Proton. Fucking hell, not even a year ago I migrated from Gmail
Me too. Same predicament. I was a paid user of Proton.
Just got moved over to paid Tuta, and it seemed to go smoothly.
Learn your lesson and switch to a custom domain :) that way you will never have to change all your services’ email addresses anymore, when you want to switch mail provider.
That’s what I’m leaning towards. Now to think of a domain that’s easy enough I can tell my email over the phone of needed
Yeah, this is gonna be my next move I think. I was using Proton VPN for a while and just recently started migrating my emails there, then they started doing all of this.
I wanted to self host my email anyway, but now I have no excuse. I’ve been burned by the last team I expected it to come from, I’ll be self-reliant now
SAME! I only just finished getting all my servers and custom domain set up, and I already have to look for a new provider.
If someone has any recommendations for a good hosted email, VPN and online storage provider let us know. It seems there’s not many good options left.
“limited resources” wtf? just copy and paste the content. I guess they didn’t like the backslash on Mastodon because of the CEO and Trump bootlicker Andy Yen
This is even more ridiculous given they have a bluesky account and all they need to do is follow the bridge and their content will be ported to mastodon. Literally 5 seconds.
Oh yeah that’s prob it. On Reddit they can delete any negative comments
Same on Bluesky actually. They can hide comments they don’t like in response to their posts.
Welp. Guess I’m never using that bluesky account I created to pad their growth metrics.
Yeah not even copy paste, this has been easily automatable for years.
It’s the age of stinginess
I was an apologist for Proton during the whole Andy Yen commentary mess, but this is a really sus choice for Proton to be making.
All that matters under capitalism is growth. I wonder if the thinking here is that Proton has already captured all the geek/privacy enthusiast crowd that it’s going to, and Andy Yen’s social fuck-up basically killed any future expansion in that space, so this is part of a pivot to new markets and abandonment of areas they know they aren’t going to win back.
If so, I’d expect to see Proton making expanded ad buys targeting preppers, libertarians, sov-cit types and other “I’m being watched!!” kooks.
They’re focusing on platforms that allow them to censor discussion.
Same. I’ll be shopping around for something else when my sub comes up.
It’s as if with each passing day, Proton wakes up and chooses to wear a slightly different red flag for a cape than the one they wore yesterday. I’m obviously being hyperbolic here, but I’m also a bit upset with myself for having decided to get an annual subscription with them last November.
I’ve heard good things about Mullvad for VPN and Tuta for mail. I’ve got my own domain that I can start using with whatever mail host I land on.
I’m in the U.S. What other mail providers are people using, and what other VPN providers should I be considering?
If you ever want to torrent, some service that allows port forwarding, like AirVPN or PureVPN. A popular alternative of mullvad does not allow this.
I just wanted to follow back up on this helpful comment here and the ones along with it from other posters. After testing and review, combined with what folks explained below, I can say for sure I’m looking for a service with port forwarding. And now I understand how someone could unknowingly offload the port forwarding responsibility to other parties thereby making torrents less accessible than may have been intended while mistakenly being under the impression they were providing equitable accessibility just because “it looks like it’s working”.
I feel like this should have been more obvious way sooner, but my skull is remarkably thick it seems. Thanks for helping me wrinkle my brain a little more today.
You keep posting this and I haven’t been using port forwarding at all but torrents keep coming through. What am I missing here? Serious question, because I do not know what I’m either doing wrong or missing out on with port forwarding and I have not been experiencing what I would call a degraded experience as far as I can tell, but there’s a whole world of things that I’m entirely ignorant to.
A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.
So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.
As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn’t work.
Thanks, this is a little difficult to parse while I’m looking at my seeds uploading at ratios well over 1.00 but just the same I’m running a new VPN tunnel with port forwarding enabled to see what difference it makes.
Plex works for the people I share with outside my network. No port forwarding. I just don’t get what I am not getting, and every explainer I get is basically what you posted (no offense) and it doesn’t match what my experience is showing me.
Here is it illustrated by multiple examples:
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
- Another person with ports closed wants to get the torrent. They will never be able to get it since you two can’t establish a connection.
- Another person with an open port wants to get the torrent. Eventually, after some delay, your client connects to the tracker and gets a list of people who want to get the torrent (leechers). You get the IP and port of the person who wants to get the torrent, you connect to them, you start uploading to them.
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, but have ports open
- No matter if a leecher has ports closed or open, they get your IP+Port from the tracker, connect to you, and you upload to them
The situation with more clients is more nuanced, but essentially the same:
- Situation: There are 5 seeders with open ports seeding a torrent
- Everything works perfectly all the time
- Situation: There are 5 seeders with closed ports seeding a torrent
- For a leecher with open port, everything works perfectly
- For a leecher with closed port, they will never get the torrent ever
- Situation: There are 5 seeders seeding a torrent. 4 have their ports closed, 1 has it open.
- 10 leechers with ports closed want to get the torrent. The only one that can upload to them is the 1 seeder with port open, the other 4 seeders are useless.
- 10 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent. All 5 seeders seed their torrent equally and everything works perfectly.
- 5 leechers with ports closed and 5 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent.
- The 5 leechers with ports closed are only serviced by the 1 seeder with port open
- The 5 leechers with port open get the torrent from all 5 seeders.
- The 1 seeder with open port seeds to every leecher, the protocol doesn’t discriminate. So in a perfectly equal world, the 1 seeder with port open seeds to all 10 leechers, so each leecher gets 1/10th of their upload speed.
- The 4 seeders with closed port only seed to the 5 leechers with open port, giving each of them 1/5th of their upload speed.
- This means that, if you add this all up, the 5 leechers with closed ports get 1/10th (1 seeder times 1/10th) of one seeders’ full upload speed, while the leechers with open ports get 9/10ths (1 seeder times 1/10th and 4 seeders times 2/10ths) of one seeders’ full upload speed.
as you can see, the people with open ports have a massive speed advantage in this example, literally getting 9 times the upload speed available in the network. But essentially, torrenting still works as long as some people have open ports, just everyone with closed ports is at a severe disadvantage.
Now there are a couple more issues with closed ports (like DHT/pex not working) but they all boil down to the same problem: the ones with closed ports can only get stuff from people with open ports. Thus they are at a massive disadvantage and get reduced speeds or in contrived situations with few seeders even nothing.
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
I think port forwarding is more important for seeding when it comes to torrents. Someone has to be able to initiate the connection.
Well that is something I’ll need to look into. My seed ratios seem to be keeping up too though, so I’m still not sure if port forwarding is a solution in search of a problem on my end. I guess I have more learning to do. Thank you for giving me a direction to start investigating.
If you’re not port-forwarding, only peers that are port-forwarding can download from you. And you can only download from peers that are port-forwarding. There can be times where a torrent only has a few seeders, but they are not port-forwarding, and if you’re not either, you won’t be able to download the torrent.
Ah ok thank you, I think the fact that the other party could be providing this capability was the component that I wasn’t conceptualizing before. Thank you for this post, I don’t know why this was so hard to grasp for me but this landed.
I’ve used Mullvad VPN for almost a year and it’s amazing. I only switched to Proton because I use all their services.
On Mastodon, Proton is held to a higher standard. That’s why they left for the dumb masses instead.
