I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

A is definitely the lesser of two weevils.

Dear Earth, apart from the many terrible things we have done historically, we, the British, are most recently sorry for David Icke, Andrew Wakefield and now Graham Hancock. We have tried to balance this out but one David Attenborough only goes so far.

One of his kids is a Netflix exec apparently.

A few little things rather than one or two big things - email advertised as private but they won’t let you use anonymous addresses (like anonaddy or duck.com) for recovery addresses, an ever growing portfolio of products that seem unfinished or incomplete or lacking in standard features like they’re trying to corner the whole privacy market rather than making one or two products but making them really good, poor customer service and support as a continual theme throughout their existence.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting they’re doing anything dodgy, I just feel that I don’t really trust them. They just make really odd choices and it all feels like a haphazard rush.

You would think that someone at Proton would’ve had the foresight to realise the reputational damage this (along with the LLM announcement) would do to the company.

Without wanting to sound smart after the fact, I’ve been suspicious about Proton for years. I briefly had an email account with them but I could never quite shake the feeling there is something off about the whole company. This move just confirms to me I was correct to be suspicious.

It is worth noting though, that Proton doesn’t allow you to use certain domains for recovery addresses. Admittedly this was awhile ago and maybe things have changed there but when I first joined Proton they wouldn’t allow me to set a duck.com or simplelogin.com or addy.io address as a recovery email.

Obviously using an apple ID is stupid but Proton could make more of an effort too.

That’s true, there’s always going to have to be some trust, but a provider that takes the time and expense to invest in a privacy audit or defend their clients by not logging and establishing that in court certainly indicates they’re worth having that trust in.

Do ISP’s monitor or sell or pass on your data? Yes.

Do VPN’s? Depends on the VPN. Find one that doesn’t and can back that up with 3rd party audits and legal encounters.

So can a good VPN protect your privacy? No, not by themselves. A VPN is part of an overall toolkit to be as private as you personally would like to be. It can help protect your privacy, that’s all.

It’s really that simple.

That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

Sure, but even the most ‘normie’ of my friends have heard of FFox. I think it’s fair to say it’s pretty mainstream even if its not widely adopted. You’re right that they do claim to be privacy respecting and I think they are when compared to the immediate competition. It’s a matter of degree. Are they more private than Chrome? Yes. And that’s a step in the right direction whilst at the same time people like you and I know they could do a lot more.

I don’t disagree with you that Mozilla are not exactly on the ball, all I’m saying is that Brave comparing their privacy hardened fork of Chrome with a non privacy hardened mainline browser is, at best, disingenuous.

Right, but what I said was that those of us who care about privacy know is that FFox is a starting point, not an end point. FFox is a more private browser than Chrome. But Brave is a privacy hardened fork of Chrome, therefore a more valid comparison is between Brave and a privacy hardened fork of FFox.

I think those of us who care enough about privacy issues to even be aware that Brave exists are well aware that out of the box FFox is a starting point, not an end point. FFox vs Chrome is a valid basis for comparison in a way that this simply isn’t. Comparing Brave with LibreWolf or Mullvad is a more valid comparison.

Looks like yunohost with a nicer interface but less apps and less config options.

I understand that, but surely the Admin who took the action isn’t in a different timezone form themselves? What was stopping them immediately posting just before or just after taking the action?

Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.

It’s really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you’re all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin’s when they’re onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?