Certainly hoping the child-raping centaurs aren’t running my email server… but I think there’s a little more here than blissful ignorance. I think it matters that, even if my new mail CEO is as bad as Yen, he hopefully sees that he’ll be punished if he acts like Yen. Because I’m not the only one that has left Proton: I think Yen is really going to feel the heat. Hopefully that deflates the egos of other techbro overlords…
No free service is good if you care about privacy.
Yeah, I canceled my sub. I have no idea if the CEO of my new email provider is any better, but I know that Yen is abusive to his employees, and that matters to me. I know he’s deep in the throes of AI psychosis, and that makes me not trust him at all. I’m gone.
The real tell here is when Yen berated an engineer who voiced concerns about security, saying “stop finding ways to be slow, start finding ways to be faster”. He’s a C-suite baby who wants what he wants RIGHT NOW!
When the suits start acting like engineers who care about best practices are being obstacles instead of valuable stewards of quality, you know you’re dealing with losers who can’t be trusted to not run things into the ground. Any walking back that Yen does now, you know he’s just biding his time to ride out the kerfuffle, and he’s just going to low-key abuse his employees at a slightly slower pace, but he’s going to get what he wants.
Canceled my sub, moved my mail.
Because it’s not super easy. DNS management isn’t a button-click process, for the most part: if you’re trying to control your data and care about privacy, there’s no super easy service out there for you. You need to find a domain registrar, buy the domain you want, and configure it yourself. The help your email provider gives you to configure it might be grammatically different from how your registrar wants it entered, so it can be an annoying process.
It’s not rocket surgery, but it’s not just “enter name and password and IMAP server name and voila” either.
They’re going to try to make non-cloud computers illegal in the next decade. Count on it.
mailbox.org