Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps
then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
As a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist.
According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy
Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.
So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
I don't like the idea of moving from google's ecosystem to proton. While they're better, ecosystems tend to get locked down or change for the worse.I'm not planning to repeat the google cycle. I got my own domain for email, bitwarden for passwords, firefox forks for browsing, and many other stuff to get off google. Also I realised that stuff like contacts, notes, calendar don't really need to be on the cloud, but I'm planning to self host some services like that, mostly for the nerd in me.
We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.
But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.
It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.
The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.
Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.
If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.
I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
Firefox sync clearly requires a central server. For any kind of peer to peer syncing to work you must have the machines on at the same time and accessible. And then there is the issue of NATs, including CGNATs. To work reliably these almost always have to have some kind of relays anyway (Tailscale's DERP, Syncthing also has relays).
For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.
Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install.
As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue
Yes what would be better is a "libsyntching" that i can plug to a software so that it does not require additional brain power, i.e install Note app on device A and B, pair them once, fire and forget.
Well WebDav/CalDav/CardDav works quite OK. Baïkal is trivial to selfhost (cal+card) then you just pick some webdav implementation like KaraDav/PicoDav/FlyDav and you are good.
Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.
IMHO the problem starts when you need to share your calendar with the outside, then you need to expose that service to the Internet and, to me, it's a whole different level of complexity making sure it remains safe.
Yes I'm aware, what I'm saying is, in the time between setting up my home server again, I've realised it's not even that useful. I used to think that having my todo and calendar locally on my phone was unusable.
Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?
I had troubles with Apple blocking a bunch of range IPs from OVH, because they don’t handle abuse claims. It didn’t show up in blocklists at the time, but was in practice unusable.
IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays.
I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace.
It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
> search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets.
Not sure if it's related but
Proton does not hold your unencrypted email body content
consequently only you do once you are logged in. Thus you can't have server side search on your email content, only on email title. What you can have though is client side full-text search on body content. For that you have to enable it via the search box, details https://proton.me/support/search-message-content
It's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.
Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason.
The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.
But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.
>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows.
I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).
Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.
edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.
Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)
It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.
I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.
> I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding
Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.
I use the bridge and a real mail client with proton and the search is fine. You can even hook the bridge into tailscale, so it works across my devices with a real mail client also (e.g phones tablets etc).
The app. With MS365 I get terrible search results. And worse, my work email has access to some shared accounts which I can’t access from Apple mail as 2FA will only work for the primary account.
I am using paid version of Proton Mail and search is working in thunderbird connected to their IMAP/SMTP bridge just alright. But web interface may suck, I did not use the web for a long time.
The web search feature isnt great.
With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.
Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.
this is a soft case of "you're using it wrong/didn't read what proton mail is" they physically cannot offer you this functionality even if they really wanted to. Although you can enable message body search and it has to be indexed on your client (which takes a long time and is a pretty bad UX - but there is no alternative).
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
Okay looks like proton does a lot nowadays.
But if someone wants a nice email provider that just works I can't stop to recommend posteo. A german email provider. 1€/month and they are just great. Been using them for 15 years now or something like that and I never had any problems. At least I can't remember any. They also always give out a transparency report[1] and apparently can't hand out much data to governments, because the data is just encrypted and they can't access it.
The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.
Not being able to use your domain is a pretty massive downside.
The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.
True and nowadays I would take that into consideration too. But I was young when I created that account (I think it was around some leak scandal or whatever that made me move from hotmail to posteo). But it turned out to be a nice decision.
For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that
It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :(
* note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above
Infomanikak “kSuite bussiness” plan 79eur year. 5 email adresses. 3TB drive (their kDrive is legit better than google drive). WebDav/CardDav/CalDav. Their kMeet conferencing is solid.
Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.
I don't want to be _that_ guy pushing Infomaniak on each thread about email, but, yeah, it allowed me to get out of Google (with Kagi) with quite a lot of success.
Regarding Euria, I don't use it much since I have Kagi Assistant and other things via work, but I was quite surprised by the results given its cost.
The only annoying thing I saw was that it kept answering in French even though I prompted in English.
I really want to get my entire company out of Google and into Infomaniak but persuading anyone to use their docs suite is going to be impossible, it's awful.
Or in this case have a look at the Google Graveyard and/or those many stories of users that lost access to their Google account without any way to contact an actual person that could help them.
You can get all the domain stuff for less than 1 € from any competent hoster, e.g. netcup. For cloud drive, if you really want to put your own files on someone else's server, there are tons of cheaper options, e.g. 2 TB for 10 €/month from strato.
Gemini is of course something that no one needs.
I think it's reasonable to doubt this, and/or wonder how long until they decide to change this, and/or make exceptions like "to make your search experience better, Gemini now indexes your metadata (but only metadata so that's okay)"
I'd love to switch my SaaS stack to europe. But loops, resend, cloudflare, supabase, stripe/polar are kinda baked in my SaaS starterkit and it's easy to spin up a new idea and test traction. So if anyone has alternatives, I'm all ears.
What's this person's phone OS? This seems somewhat overlooked here. To me, the mobile OS is the centerpiece of any ecosystem. That leaves only two options.
HarmonyOS Next (Huawei) is independent from Android. So that leaves three options, even if Harmony is mostly China focussed. They have tons of users there.
For me its going from $0 to $15 a month using Proton which feels way to high. Im cutting proton and switching to Proton free tier for email and Backblaze for storage. Getting a little $100 pc to put in my draw to handle hosting all the stuff i need. My budget is around $10 a month to cover all the tech NEEDS. I think its doable but I will need to pay with my time to learn about/setup a foss stack. I'll also need to put some money aside to drop a donation to each project in the stack yearly.
Proton’s $4 a month is where I ended up landing a few years ago and it’s cheaper with the 2-year lock in they give every now and then. Sharing just in case it’s buried under unlimited. Although our usage may vary in case there are things in unlimited you need.
10 USD seems like it should cover the electricity for a small mini PC server (counting maybe 30 watts idle), and if your electricity isn't expensive, it will cover the purchase cost spread over a few years too.
That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.
My tech needs arent huge. Email+email alias service, cloud storage for PC backups and syncing data across devices, VPN, server to host internet thangs, domain, mobile data. Yeah now that im laying it out $10 is not going to be enough but i'll try my best to work within the constraints and see what I can do. I'll probably do a need budget for $10 and a wants budget of $20.
You really don't want to host email yourself. Major PITA, time sink and constant possibility of your emails being just silently discarded after being accepted at the big providers.
I hear good things about Proton, but you are still sticking yourself into an ecosystem.
For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important.
For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider.
All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.
I tired NextCloud the other day on a 2GB DigitalOcean VPS. It ground to a halt pretty quickly. My plan was to try run it on a Pi, but I gave up on that idea.
It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
Why are you stuck? To migrate to another provider i just have to change some MX records which I control myself anyway?
Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…
> Blogging, Newsletter & Co.: Well, as you can see, I’m writing on Substack. There are no alternatives except to host it entirely yourself, but that doesn’t make sense to me right now.
This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?
Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.
Substack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most
From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.
Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.
If you're comfortable going with a US-based provider, https://www.scipress.io/ seems a lot more honest. They've DIY'd their legal documents badly, but they prohibit AI-farms and don't appear to sell user data. If I had to pick based on first impressions, I'm far more inclined to trust Scipress.
“Worse” is fully dependant on what you’re looking to get out of a product. I consider anything Google/Meta to be about as bad as it gets because I disagree with their business practices and value my privacy.
ah yes, the polish that keeps begging you to give them your address for your "own safety"
the polish that can't even delete your entire spam folder half the time
the polish that asks you to verify you own your own email address via email if you want to add an alias to send an email from your own domain (e.g: if you have wildcard inbox and want to reply from one of the addresses you used)
the same polish that gives you no results if you search "one" and the email actually contains "oneword" - you know, search, the thing google is known for.
They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.
That's a big deal to some of us.
Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.
> USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.
I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.
> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,
Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.
On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.
> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,
Strange to compare "scares" with a business model that's 20 years old now. Sure the EU is far from perfect but it's like comparing a well known problem to a potential one. One is bad, the other might sucks. It's definitely not equivalent.
We agree, but not for the reasons you think we do.
Chatcontrol is literally 1984. It's mandated at the provider level. You can't opt out.
You can always chose not to participate in the social media, sharing whatever you do. You can't not participate in chat control. Same same, but different.
You can't opt out because there's nothing to opt out from, chat control is not law, it failed to be approved every single time people tried to bring it up, sometimes it even failed before being voted on (like this last time)
All is hyperbole, but given the reach of big tech combined with intelligence gathering it probably does have that access to almost all. Not because of lack of encryption but because there are so many routes to getting that data. The combination of US domination of cloud services with even greater domination of device OSes the US has access to most data if it wants to.
That's a choice. But it's not everyone's choice. And with <waves hands wildly around>, the non-USA choice is rapidly becoming more popular - at least among the people I know and talk to outside the US.
I did. And I chose China and Russia, which is included in non-US.
I'm congratulating clever non-US people by their commitment to privacy and human rights by moving to platforms owned by these countries. What's the problem?
> They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy
I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.
Care to elaborate how chat control came into effect?
Last time I checked, it was always rejected, no matter how they reforrmed it. The EU is not one voice, it will always have different opinions. What matters is what's actually voted into law, chat control tried multiple times and it never was.
Also, would you be so kind as to share those wrongthinking related with DSA?
So we an focus on improving things and not bashing on them.
I have fully bought into Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a walled garden but it’s a pretty nice walled garden, and of all the big tech companies, they are better about privacy (not perfect, but better) than most. I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
It sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.
> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?
Apple has a solid hardware business and massive profits from their App Store tax, they are not dependent on ad business in the way Google is. Very different incentives.
They might not be dependent on ad revenue, but they are a greedy company that will not leave any money on the table. Next year, more ads are coming to the App Store that already generates a profit of over $10 billion/year: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-...
> I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...
so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.
assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.
I find it funny that right at the start the author claims he wants "privacy and data sovereignty" and then he comes into the EU.
Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty".
Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1]
So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words.
They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime.
Yes, countries in EU prosecute crime. This may be a surprise to some people, but for a long time publicly insulting someone has been a crime in Germany.
I started watching YouTuber Evan Edinger recently and it’s been a breath of fresh air because he’s been saying things I understood to be true a long time ago, but never quite verified until now.
One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.
Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.
You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.
Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
Understanding a perspective and agreeing with it aren’t the same thing. Herring’s point was about the ‘I don’t see why anyone would need this’ framing, not that the position itself is hard to grasp.
Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
As a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist.
According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy
Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.
So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
I don't like the idea of moving from google's ecosystem to proton. While they're better, ecosystems tend to get locked down or change for the worse.I'm not planning to repeat the google cycle. I got my own domain for email, bitwarden for passwords, firefox forks for browsing, and many other stuff to get off google. Also I realised that stuff like contacts, notes, calendar don't really need to be on the cloud, but I'm planning to self host some services like that, mostly for the nerd in me.
We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.
Owning your domain just changes your point of failure from Google to your registrar. It is not, in fact, any safer.
It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.
But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.
It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.
It's always a varying grade, not either/or.
The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.
Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.
If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.
It's easier to keep track of your own IP addresses than whatever you'd hosts or DNS hack to over at Google.
I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
Firefox sync clearly requires a central server. For any kind of peer to peer syncing to work you must have the machines on at the same time and accessible. And then there is the issue of NATs, including CGNATs. To work reliably these almost always have to have some kind of relays anyway (Tailscale's DERP, Syncthing also has relays).
For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.
Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install. As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue
This year I moved off LastPass, and started using [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) to sync my [KeepassXC](https://keepassxc.org/). It works pretty well, but doesn't have any automatic conflict resolution (I've been working on [something](https://github.com/LightAndLight/syncthing-merge) for this).
Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.
Perhaps you might like syncthing?
Yes what would be better is a "libsyntching" that i can plug to a software so that it does not require additional brain power, i.e install Note app on device A and B, pair them once, fire and forget.
Well WebDav/CalDav/CardDav works quite OK. Baïkal is trivial to selfhost (cal+card) then you just pick some webdav implementation like KaraDav/PicoDav/FlyDav and you are good.
Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.
IMHO the problem starts when you need to share your calendar with the outside, then you need to expose that service to the Internet and, to me, it's a whole different level of complexity making sure it remains safe.
Yes I'm aware, what I'm saying is, in the time between setting up my home server again, I've realised it's not even that useful. I used to think that having my todo and calendar locally on my phone was unusable.
You can self host email in an afternoon, its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
It's not about configuration but rather your IP reputation and the struggle to not have your mail go straight to addressee's spam folder.
Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP and setting up DMARC and DKIM.
I see this reasoning as the #1 reason not to self host, but it really isn't a big issue once you do the initial setup.
> Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP
Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?
Use an IP reputation tool like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
What you will find is that many dedicated IP's from larger vendors are fine.
I personally use Hetzner and don't have any issues with reputation at all.
I had troubles with Apple blocking a bunch of range IPs from OVH, because they don’t handle abuse claims. It didn’t show up in blocklists at the time, but was in practice unusable.
IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays.
Edit: s/mining/migrating
Mining?
lol thanks for the catch. Meant migrating
I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace.
It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
> search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets.
Not sure if it's related but
consequently only you do once you are logged in. Thus you can't have server side search on your email content, only on email title. What you can have though is client side full-text search on body content. For that you have to enable it via the search box, details https://proton.me/support/search-message-contentIt's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.
Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason.
The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.
But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.
>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows.
I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).
Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.
edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.
Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)
It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.
I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.
> I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding
Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.
> the search in Proton Mail is so bad
Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.
I use it, the search is very bad.
I use the bridge and a real mail client with proton and the search is fine. You can even hook the bridge into tailscale, so it works across my devices with a real mail client also (e.g phones tablets etc).
The desktop client is rubbish, though, agreed.
Apple Mail the client or the web?
Apple Mail.app is the fastest search available. I use it with o365 specifically for search.
The app. With MS365 I get terrible search results. And worse, my work email has access to some shared accounts which I can’t access from Apple mail as 2FA will only work for the primary account.
I am using paid version of Proton Mail and search is working in thunderbird connected to their IMAP/SMTP bridge just alright. But web interface may suck, I did not use the web for a long time.
The web search feature isnt great. With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.
Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.
this is a soft case of "you're using it wrong/didn't read what proton mail is" they physically cannot offer you this functionality even if they really wanted to. Although you can enable message body search and it has to be indexed on your client (which takes a long time and is a pretty bad UX - but there is no alternative).
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
Proton is ok to meh - great marketing though. Try Infomaniak instead.
Okay looks like proton does a lot nowadays. But if someone wants a nice email provider that just works I can't stop to recommend posteo. A german email provider. 1€/month and they are just great. Been using them for 15 years now or something like that and I never had any problems. At least I can't remember any. They also always give out a transparency report[1] and apparently can't hand out much data to governments, because the data is just encrypted and they can't access it.
The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.
- [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report
Not being able to use your domain is a pretty massive downside.
The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.
True and nowadays I would take that into consideration too. But I was young when I created that account (I think it was around some leak scandal or whatever that made me move from hotmail to posteo). But it turned out to be a nice decision.
For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that
I’m heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and nothing would make me happier than switching to a privacy-focused European alternative.
However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think.
I get:
- granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.)
- 2tb of google drive space
- and now Gemini, which is quite nice
It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :(
* note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above
Infomanikak “kSuite bussiness” plan 79eur year. 5 email adresses. 3TB drive (their kDrive is legit better than google drive). WebDav/CardDav/CalDav. Their kMeet conferencing is solid.
Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.
I don't want to be _that_ guy pushing Infomaniak on each thread about email, but, yeah, it allowed me to get out of Google (with Kagi) with quite a lot of success.
Regarding Euria, I don't use it much since I have Kagi Assistant and other things via work, but I was quite surprised by the results given its cost.
The only annoying thing I saw was that it kept answering in French even though I prompted in English.
I really want to get my entire company out of Google and into Infomaniak but persuading anyone to use their docs suite is going to be impossible, it's awful.
It’s far from impossible, you just have to prioritize your privacy at more than a few bucks a month.
Nothing would make parent happier, but they've placed a very small price on their happiness.
If it was just privacy it would be an easy sell but there is nothing close to a fully functional alternative then Microsoft.
Or in this case have a look at the Google Graveyard and/or those many stories of users that lost access to their Google account without any way to contact an actual person that could help them.
You can get all the domain stuff for less than 1 € from any competent hoster, e.g. netcup. For cloud drive, if you really want to put your own files on someone else's server, there are tons of cheaper options, e.g. 2 TB for 10 €/month from strato. Gemini is of course something that no one needs.
How do people get more than 2tb of backup/cloud storage? it seems expensive to pay 20+ per month for this. 2tb+ should be very common these days?
Many people view their personal emails being slurped up by a Google AI model as a pretty big negative.
If you pay for Workspace (like he says he does) your data is your own, just like for any SaaS product.
I think it's reasonable to doubt this, and/or wonder how long until they decide to change this, and/or make exceptions like "to make your search experience better, Gemini now indexes your metadata (but only metadata so that's okay)"
Then how is Gemini of any use?
Not really though. The data is also Google's and being in the US it's also accessible to other entities.
Does this include Gemini CLI the terminal vibe coding?
Grammarly alternative: LanguageTool. Used by EU institutions
And it works great for my languages. I really like it.
I'd love to switch my SaaS stack to europe. But loops, resend, cloudflare, supabase, stripe/polar are kinda baked in my SaaS starterkit and it's easy to spin up a new idea and test traction. So if anyone has alternatives, I'm all ears.
What's this person's phone OS? This seems somewhat overlooked here. To me, the mobile OS is the centerpiece of any ecosystem. That leaves only two options.
HarmonyOS Next (Huawei) is independent from Android. So that leaves three options, even if Harmony is mostly China focussed. They have tons of users there.
Strictly speaking, that's not quite true. There's non big-tech Android distros like Graphene and /e/.
To me, it is the most unimportant one. I don't even read email on my phone. The screen is way too small to do anything useful.
For me its going from $0 to $15 a month using Proton which feels way to high. Im cutting proton and switching to Proton free tier for email and Backblaze for storage. Getting a little $100 pc to put in my draw to handle hosting all the stuff i need. My budget is around $10 a month to cover all the tech NEEDS. I think its doable but I will need to pay with my time to learn about/setup a foss stack. I'll also need to put some money aside to drop a donation to each project in the stack yearly.
If Proton is too expensive, you can use zoho. I switched from Google and I'm missing nothing.
I moved from Zoho to Gmail, b/c of their pricing. Google's basic plan is $7/mo [0], whereas the lowest cost plan with zoho is $25/mo [1].
Zoho's free plan stopped offering custom domains and/or limits imap access.
[0] - https://workspace.google.com/lp/business/ [1] - https://www.zoho.com/us/billing/pricing/
The zoho link you provided is for the billing product, not the email product. I use zoho with three low usage domains and pay $1 a month.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
Infomaniak is cheaper and in my experience a lot better swiss provider.
Proton’s $4 a month is where I ended up landing a few years ago and it’s cheaper with the 2-year lock in they give every now and then. Sharing just in case it’s buried under unlimited. Although our usage may vary in case there are things in unlimited you need.
I don't think a $10 budget will suffice.
10 USD seems like it should cover the electricity for a small mini PC server (counting maybe 30 watts idle), and if your electricity isn't expensive, it will cover the purchase cost spread over a few years too.
That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.
My tech needs arent huge. Email+email alias service, cloud storage for PC backups and syncing data across devices, VPN, server to host internet thangs, domain, mobile data. Yeah now that im laying it out $10 is not going to be enough but i'll try my best to work within the constraints and see what I can do. I'll probably do a need budget for $10 and a wants budget of $20.
You really don't want to host email yourself. Major PITA, time sink and constant possibility of your emails being just silently discarded after being accepted at the big providers.
Vivaldi doesn't block ads as well as uBlock Origin, so I'll stick with uBlock Origin which means Firefox and friends anymore.
You can run uBlock in Vivaldi.
Not on mobile.
It is not an EU based stack. Proton is Swiss and Switzerland is not in the EU.
The title is “an almost All-EU Stack”
Close enough
Its close, but its not the EU. Would you describe using British services as an "all-EU stack?
I am not saying its a bad thing. It may well be better than the EU (I do not know the current state of Swiss law).
I hear good things about Proton, but you are still sticking yourself into an ecosystem.
For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important.
For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider.
All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.
I tired NextCloud the other day on a 2GB DigitalOcean VPS. It ground to a halt pretty quickly. My plan was to try run it on a Pi, but I gave up on that idea.
It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
Why are you stuck? To migrate to another provider i just have to change some MX records which I control myself anyway?
Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…
I would remove grammarly (due to privacy)
Does Proton have transactional email already? Back when I was looking it did not seem to have it and I went with Zoho (not EU, I know) instead.
Proton is not EU either. it is Swiss.
The FADP is very similar to GDPR.
I am not saying its a bad thing, I am saying it is inaccurate.
GDPR like law and no chat control sounds pretty good.
50% expenditure saving sounds good, but how many more hours per month are you now spending making it all work?
> Blogging, Newsletter & Co.: Well, as you can see, I’m writing on Substack. There are no alternatives except to host it entirely yourself, but that doesn’t make sense to me right now.
This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?
Keila: https://www.keila.io/
Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.
https://ghost.org — Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore.
Substack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most
Yeah, I haven't found any dedicated subscription-blog providers outside the US – but I definitely remember seeing at least 2 in the past!
while a blog is like the simplest thing you can self-host apart from static sites
From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.
Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.
You probably know but Substacks’ free speech thing is a huge turn off.
That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
unfortunately some occasional hate speech is the price we have to pay for free speech
Some countries choose that path and they are where they are.
We are where we are due to our choices too - New Zealand.
There are countries with freedom of expression without this pseudo-'free speech' BS.
Unfortunate as that notification error might be, you cannot call free speech free if you only allow if for some opinions.
"Free speech" is a thing between persons and the state. It does not require persons to accommodate nazis.
Some corporations claim otherwise because they think nazis are good for business.
https://www.beehiiv.com/ is another one.
They appear to be based in New York, which is in the US. They're also not very privacy-friendly.
Ah, yes. They're a step up from Substack in some ways though, from what people say, so it might be worth a switch compared to staying on Substack.
If you're comfortable going with a US-based provider, https://www.scipress.io/ seems a lot more honest. They've DIY'd their legal documents badly, but they prohibit AI-farms and don't appear to sell user data. If I had to pick based on first impressions, I'm far more inclined to trust Scipress.
boosty.to is a Substack alternative, outside of both the US and the EU.
They moved from platform A to platform B.
And platform B is basically a worse version of everything than platform A.
I admire the motivation though
“Worse” is fully dependant on what you’re looking to get out of a product. I consider anything Google/Meta to be about as bad as it gets because I disagree with their business practices and value my privacy.
“Worse” has a defined meaning and they’re right. Proton stuff doesn’t hold a candle to the level of polish of Google.
So that definition does not cover "privacy"? Where does one look up the definition of "worse" you're referring to?
ah yes, the polish that keeps begging you to give them your address for your "own safety"
the polish that can't even delete your entire spam folder half the time
the polish that asks you to verify you own your own email address via email if you want to add an alias to send an email from your own domain (e.g: if you have wildcard inbox and want to reply from one of the addresses you used)
the same polish that gives you no results if you search "one" and the email actually contains "oneword" - you know, search, the thing google is known for.
such amazing polish.
Care to elaborate?
They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.
That's a big deal to some of us.
Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.
> USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.
I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.
> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,
Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.
On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.
> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,
Strange to compare "scares" with a business model that's 20 years old now. Sure the EU is far from perfect but it's like comparing a well known problem to a potential one. One is bad, the other might sucks. It's definitely not equivalent.
> It's definitely not equivalent.
We agree, but not for the reasons you think we do.
Chatcontrol is literally 1984. It's mandated at the provider level. You can't opt out.
You can always chose not to participate in the social media, sharing whatever you do. You can't not participate in chat control. Same same, but different.
You can't opt out because there's nothing to opt out from, chat control is not law, it failed to be approved every single time people tried to bring it up, sometimes it even failed before being voted on (like this last time)
But you get that it's still hypothetical at this point, while it's been going on in the US for, what, 20 years now?
I mean I don't think anyone seriously thinks the USA doesn't have access to all the EU data.
That's a bold claim, are you implying that encryption is a scam?
All is hyperbole, but given the reach of big tech combined with intelligence gathering it probably does have that access to almost all. Not because of lack of encryption but because there are so many routes to getting that data. The combination of US domination of cloud services with even greater domination of device OSes the US has access to most data if it wants to.
I do. I think many do.
I'd rather Google have my data than the EU
That's a choice. But it's not everyone's choice. And with <waves hands wildly around>, the non-USA choice is rapidly becoming more popular - at least among the people I know and talk to outside the US.
EU has always and always will be moving away from US tech
I’d argue the opposite, that the US is moving away from the rest of the ‘free’ world.
‘Free’ meaning not run by dictators.
FWIW, my perspective is from Australia, not EU.
Wow so full speed ahead on Chinese data centers and Russian social media then?
I applaud non-USA people for their dedication to human rights and privacy in their move towards those platforms.
Then again non USA countries like Australians are essentially client states of China, aren't they?
So anyone not aligning with the U.S. is basically in bed with China/Russia?
Huh, where have we heard this before?
Also, the irony here is you not seeing the ongoing Russia-US alignment.
Sorry, can you define non-US for me? Does a Chinese data centre count as a US option, or are people not moving towards "non-US" options?
Let's play the game where you slowly whittle your definition of "non-US" to a set of villages in Iceland and Norway
I'm not sure what your problem is here.
Non-US means anything that is not US. Pickup a map and start enumerating countries, China and Russia are just two of many.
I did. And I chose China and Russia, which is included in non-US.
I'm congratulating clever non-US people by their commitment to privacy and human rights by moving to platforms owned by these countries. What's the problem?
Is this new “I’d rather have Chinese my data than US”?
> They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy
I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.
Care to elaborate how chat control came into effect?
Last time I checked, it was always rejected, no matter how they reforrmed it. The EU is not one voice, it will always have different opinions. What matters is what's actually voted into law, chat control tried multiple times and it never was.
Also, would you be so kind as to share those wrongthinking related with DSA?
So we an focus on improving things and not bashing on them.
I have fully bought into Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a walled garden but it’s a pretty nice walled garden, and of all the big tech companies, they are better about privacy (not perfect, but better) than most. I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
It sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.
> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?
Apple has a solid hardware business and massive profits from their App Store tax, they are not dependent on ad business in the way Google is. Very different incentives.
They might not be dependent on ad revenue, but they are a greedy company that will not leave any money on the table. Next year, more ads are coming to the App Store that already generates a profit of over $10 billion/year: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-...
Not sure if the comment is a satire, but
> I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
HN needs to make an exception for clown emoji.
> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...
so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.
assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.
How so?
where's the proof of the claim? for one the privacy policy contradicts.
I find it funny that right at the start the author claims he wants "privacy and data sovereignty" and then he comes into the EU.
Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty".
Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1]
So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words.
They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...
Yes, countries in EU prosecute crime. This may be a surprise to some people, but for a long time publicly insulting someone has been a crime in Germany.
In America they don't wait for you to commit a thought crime, they throw you into a gulag right after trying to enter the country: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detenti...
But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.
I started watching YouTuber Evan Edinger recently and it’s been a breath of fresh air because he’s been saying things I understood to be true a long time ago, but never quite verified until now.
One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.
Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.
You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.
Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
So many words with 0 useful information.
I’m European, you self righteous authoritarian lover.
And? You're linking a US media website, one famous for having its head way up the american exceptionalism hole.
Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?
Bravo!
I Spend 0. I don't understand why anyone would need most of these services.
Try reading more books, eg autobiographies or fiction. Understanding other people’s perspectives is a skill like any other.
Still looking for that microphone you dropped!
Maybe you should take your own advise and try to understand his perspective.
This is a logical fallacy like saying one should tolerate the intolerance, because otherwise it's intolerance.
Understanding a perspective and agreeing with it aren’t the same thing. Herring’s point was about the ‘I don’t see why anyone would need this’ framing, not that the position itself is hard to grasp.
beautiful reply
Same. I mean you can tell about the level of tech literacy just by reading that OP uses NordVPN.