this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Isn’t the proton mail guy a fascist
The tweet that seemed to be bootlicking Trump was worrying and troubling in my opinion as well. However, reading this deeper analysis alleviated at least some of my fears https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Also the foundation model decisively limits the influence of the founder. There seems to be no other European email service that's quite on par with Proton. Therefore I still think they are the top alternative.
Matrix is owned by a foundation only on paper. In reality it is all owned and driven by Element, which was very much VC funded in the past but seems to have reached the end of the VC re-financing cycle by now (hence increased enshittification speed).
That explains why Synapse and some other things moved under element-hq on GitHub.
Doesn't Element get funding from some EU governments? IIRC it was used by some police force in Germany and some departments in France.
Yes they have been trying to diversify income sources and so far mostly ended up with governmet (including military and law enforcement) contracts. But they are still burning money fast, as the entire company has a VC funded startup culture where being efficient with your resources counts little.
My personal guess is that Matrix as an open ecosystem will be mostly dead in 5 years, and Element will survive as a much smaller defense contractor.
Signal isn't VC funded? I thought the WhatsApp dude gave it 50 million or something?
https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/
I never read “VC funded” as someone who donated money and also was a VC. To me it’s always Venture capitalists investments asking for power and margin returns. Hence also it makes the product much more prone to enshittify to keep the numbers go up
Signal is none of this but yes, got a headstart by someone who happens to be also ~~a VC~~ a rich person?
Edit: I edit because I cannot find anything that links Acton to vc activities actually 🤔
Thanks. That helps my understanding too. I just had a vague memory about the 50 million number.
50% of signals income (aka donations) go directly to their hosting partners Google and Amazon and the second they don’t have enough donations to pay the bills the messenger will seize working
Ye and if they owned servers they would need to pay electricity and internet connections to some capitalistic operators
If they had even solar panels they’d still buy them from capitalistic companies
If they even owned solar panel production they’d still buy materials from capitalistic mines
If they’d also buy the mines they’d now need some form of army to defend them or they’d need to pay some capitalistic mercenaries company
You understand that we have to start somewhere, right?
the second they don’t have enough donations to pay the bills the messenger will seize working
It’s a bit like worrying about donations to Wikipedia or the internet archive honestly. They are so big that probably a lot of people would stop them from failing.
simpleX and a more anti-compliance mail company like Tuta mail are even better options! Don't get comfortable halfway down the path!
Dude just let someone be proud of switching away from invasive spyware for fuck's sake. Also, SimpleX isn't inherently better than Signal and suffers way worse from the network effect. Signal has consistently shown through subpoenas that it has functionally nothing on you. They aren't "halfway down the path"; Signal is fantastic.
Beautifully put
I appreciate your article, and get what youre trying to say, but encouraging people in a direction they are already headed down is different than all or nothing.
Simplex is vc funded and doesn’t have a business model so nobody knows if it will ever be sustainable, I won’t pass any of my chats to it until they figure out their stuff.
Tuta too is for profit even if not vc funded. So the risk of easily getting sold is always there and tbh I don’t like giving money to for profit vertical companies unless necessary.
Btw no company is anti compliance. They fight in court but in the end they will comply, they have to…
I'd love to like Tuta but man was using their service a constant pain. The search is incredibly slow for any messages not downloaded and keyword matching is somehow weird, the spam filter fails terribly (my spam folder was always full of legitimate messages), assigning rules is clumsy, and you can't even bulk export mail to switch services:((
Ah yes two companies I would definitely trust