i posted this on reddit before but i wanted to get your opinion on this
i use my familys google drive/photo thing (i cant really change) and i obviously want us to switch, but my mom (who take care of this whole thing) says that she likes the ecosystem that google has. Like she uses her calendar and stuff. The closest ive found is proton, which is fine, but it doesnt really have the best rep. Any alternatives?
BTW: im not gonna self-host since im not comfortable hosting such a big thing like this
Proton is nice but still lacking many features. Nextcloud is probably the next closest thing. If you don’t want to self-host, you can just look for managed hosting.
You can rent a managed Nextcloud instance from Hetzner for a very reasonable price.
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
Ente does photos if that’s all you need, or PixelUnion offers a managed Immich instance https://pixelunion.eu/#pricing
I think Proton is quite good. They lack one feature that I need, which is integrated contacts on mobile, but once they add that, it will be a complete package.
dont they have a bad rep…? i feel like ive heard that they’re like the worst of the privacy services, but thats atleast better than google 🤷♂️
I have yet to see anything that scares me. That being said, it’s significantly better than Google no matter what way you look at it.
Sort of, but it isn’t in my view very well deserved. There is certainly quite a bit of FUD here in the fediverse, but sometimes it feels manufactured.
The CEO has made, and partially walked back, some statements favoring right wing groups, but it was mostly antitrust stuff, so I think it is mostly rich person doing rich person things.
But they claim to be politically neutral, and they are a Swiss company which already puts it in a tier above anything hosted in many other western countries.
The services themselves are technically very well done, and the applications for using them are also very good. They have a new drive cli which is good. The password manager is great. VPN is good too. The mail bridge they provide is also very good if you want to use third party mail apps but with the benefit of their encryption.
There are other services that compete strongly on each of those and more, but I don’t think any do when considering the full suite.
I’ll start this by saying I do like and use proton, but their insistence to provide a hundred different services (and force you to pay for every single one in your subscription) really hurts the service. For example:
The 2FA had an issue that leaked every single service you used by connecting to their icon server over insecure http, for a month I believe and then downplaying the severity. This wouldn’t have happened if they focused on being an email provider and pointed users to existing services like Ente Auth, instead of pushing poorly tested software to production as fast as possible. You should never store 2FA with your password manager anyways, even if it’s stored in seperate apps, so I think their choice to make a 2FA app is quite silly.
They continue to prioritize building new services such as meet and lumo over compatibility with Linux (drive sucks, and only 9 years later do they support a buggy CLI. The VPN client is buggy as hell, and if you’re not careful could leak your VPN when it crashes for the hundredth time (crashes are less common on Gnome, which is technically the only DE it’s built for, but that doesn’t change the fact that it lacks critical features that exist exclusively on MacOS and Windows) (the killswitch works as far as I can tell, but with how poorly made the client is, you should bind it in the OS itself as well)).
They require the use of Google Play services, arguing that they don’t want to waste people’s battery by running websocket based notifications. It’s a stupid defense as people who don’t have Google play services wouldn’t mind the extra battery usage for notifications. Not to mention, they can use unified push since they already encrypt their notifications anyways (Proton says they don’t need to add unified push, the users just need to use Google Play because the notification are encrypted, completely disregarding the invasiveness of Google Play and the metadata leakage from using them for push notifs).
The UI for simplelogin has not changed since acquisition from what I can tell, and continues to look like it’s from 2014. Rather than adding features to simplelogin, as you would when you purchase an entire company, they almost exclusively add features to their password manager and email client instead.
They basically force their crappy photo storage down your throat on mobile, despite being offered to join an alliance with privacy services (including Ente, an amazing photo storage service) and rejecting the offer. That’s actually a whole issue on its own. For what reason, other than greed, would a privacy company choose not to join an alliance with very respected privacy services? Is it because Tuta joined? That would be dumb and petty.
Overall, I like and use many proton services, and I think a lot of the political controversies people like to throw at proton are FUD and/or blown out of proportion. That said, if a company could do what proton does for email (tuta is nowhere close to proton imo) and exclusively does email (fun fact, tuta is exploring the cloud drive space, because I guess people never learn) I would switch in a heartbeat. If proton separated their plans so you only pay for what you need, and let me use notifications on my phone, that would be basically all my gripes in my day to day dealt with.
yeah i was looking for a vpn inside the eu/efta and couldn’t find a better alternative so i went with proton and have been very satisfied so far
bought the 2 year package, no regrets. at least not yet. if they sponsor another far right influencer i might have to switch to something else after my subscription ends
for e-mail im gonna do something different tho, dont wanna have all my eggs in one basket. but it’s completely fine if some prefer that for the convenience :)
edit: e-mail, not mail
gotcha thanks!!
Not at all. They’ve gotten some flack for turning over some data to authorities after they were legally compelled, which is something any company will either do or cease to exist. They also got some flack for some dumb statements by the CEO but those don’t affect your privacy.
ahh gotcha thanks
The tech is good. But the pushing of encryption in email services disables the use of other mail clients on free accounts (where the bridge doesn’t work), while the encryption is useless when communicating with any other mail service (with email you mostly communicate with corpos anyway). It just seems like it’s a cash grab, but it might be useful for activist groups.
I’m still looking for a free, private (at least as much as it can be) and open email service which is way harder than I expected.
I have a protonmail ACC (not using it as I need a powerful mail client, Infomaniak (very capitalist lately), which I also don’t use much.
You’ll see endless people repeating the same lines here that Andy Yen (proton ceo) is a trump supporter or something but he has already apologized for his tweet that praised some antitrust policies that was done by the republican party and specifically the FTC chair at the time. Additionally, finances show that they’re pretty on the left. Proton’s PR is so good I guess that when they try to appear to be neutral, the left finds them far right, when in reality they’re more to the left than people realize.
The rep is from a post sort of in support of a policy of the current US.
As for privacy, they comply with subpoenas when they have to (and they publish the numbers), but as they use E2E they cant decrypt anything of yours on their servers
and also because they sponsored a far-right influencer.
they promised not to do that again tho and said that it was a mistake so it should be fine
i guess its fine then
Zoho? Not the best in regards to privacy though
Maybe Murena Workspace (French) which I use, or kDrive (Swiss)
do any of them have live photo backups like google photos?
They have cloud storages where you can creat folders to store photos and anything else. In kDrive 15GB for free. For photos I use also vgy.me (UK), free, script to include it in ShareX.
Kdrive (paid the lowest tier 1TB) has a companion app ksync which backs up photos from my phone and tablet. Still have to use a home served Nextcloud to give the photo albums etc.
ah thats interesting, ill check that out thanks
Ente isn’t quite an entire ecosystem but it has Ente photos for photos and earlier this year they released Ente locker for documents. I haven’t actually used either of them but they seem to have a pretty good reputation as a company
I use their authenticator. I keep meaning to check into other things they have.
i dont think they have stuff like calendar which my mom really wants
From the rest of your comments, I think proton is going to be the closest thing for you.
yes, i was just looking for more opinions
Been using Ente for a long time. +1, they are excellent!
- Infomaniak kSuite
- Zaclys and other similar entities
- Murena Workspace (Had a breach a few years ago)
- Proton
For photos only +1 for Ente Photos, very good product. I’ve been paying for more than a year and improvements are always made from their team. Everything is FOSS and e2ee + well documented even for less techincal nerds. The only thing I don’t like is the company being registered in the USA.
