It says that “100% of the proceeds will be donated” and I recognize a few projects in their list that are worth supporting. While this still feels a bit like an ad, I thought it was newsworthy + something that the Fediverse would be supportive of?
Please share if you see any issues with this, and I can edit it into this post (or take down the post).
Full details on the link in the post, summary:
Join our charity fundraiser before it ends on January 5th
Since 2018, with support from the Proton community, we have financially supported non-profit organizations that share this vision, donating over $3 million to fuel a growing movement for a better internet. For this year’s fundraiser, we’re giving away 10 Proton Lifetime accounts, our most exclusive plan that gives you the most storage and all the features of all our current and future products, forever.
Starting today, you can enter the raffle to win a Lifetime plan. 100% of the proceeds will be donated, along with a $150,000 matching contribution from Proton. Raffle tickets are on sale from now until January 5 at 11:59 PM CET. We’ll announce the winners the following day.
Recipient details:
A portion of the funds will also go to a few organizations from past years, such as Tor, GrapheneOS, and others, as many nonprofits have seen drops in donations and are struggling to reach their budget goals.
this year’s recipients:
- Freedom House
- Free Software Foundation Europe
- Law for Change
- Ada Lovelace Institute
- Nothing2Hide
- Free Press Unlimited
- The Tech Oversight Project
- Open Data Institute
- OpenStreetMap
- Ladybird
I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.
I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.
I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.
The big difference is that they’re not publicly traded. Stocks are the root of all evil.
Proton is still a for-profit company, the change that happened was that the for-profit company was no longer owned by a single or multiple people (that can sell it whenever they want). Instead now proton is owned by the non profit that can’t be sold
Is this similar to how Mozilla is set up?
Pretty much yeah
Proton isn’t opposing capitalism though, it’s filling a niche created by other organizations’ poor privacy policies. Them being nonprofit doesn’t change that, it just places certain restrictions on themselves.
First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.
Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.
I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise,
You seemed to use Proton as an example of that. Maybe I read it differently than you intended.
Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote
I don’t think it is. My point is that Proton is a product of capitalism, as in, like any corporation, they found/created a niche and filled it. That you like this company and not others has more to do with you liking the niche than anything altruistic you think Proton is doing.
Proton is overpriced for what they offer, but they can charge that much because of brand recognition. Look at Tuta, a for profit company that offers similar services with more features for less.
Proton is a product of a competive market, and that’s a good thing.
The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.
Well yeah, Proton is basically capitalism working as intended. They’re a smallish business exploiting a gap in the market.
Being for profit as a legal entity doesn’t necessarily mean they will exploit every angle they can to make a profit. When a company has to answer to shareholders, like when they go public or sell private share to raise capital, that’s when it becomes a real issue. It really depends on their bylaws and who’s running the organization otherwise.
Non-profits are just for-profits for management. They make things slightly more transparent. That’s about it.
As an owner of a competing email service, I’m primed to dislike Proton, but god damn, I just can’t. They’re an awesome company. I hope that in the coming capitalistic hellscape (wait, we’re already in a capitalistic hellscape), Proton is able to defeat the 70% market share behemoths of Gmail and Exchange.
I’m really glad to see they’re supporting Ladybird too. That’s such a cool project.
Which provider if you don’t mind sharing?
It’s https://port87.com/. I’m still working to make it ready for business use, but it’s ready to use as your personal email. It’s really good for keeping your email organized, which is something I’ve always struggled with personally.
It’s behind a waitlist right now, but I send out invites about once a week.
Good job, I’m with tuta and am super hesitant to switch since ctempla dropping the ball 3 years ago else I’d ask for an invite. But honestly need more indie providers like tuta, ctempla and proton.
I completely understand. One thing I’m working on right now is custom domain support, so that you can either use
yourname-labelname@yourdomain.comor even justlabelname@yourdomain.com. That way if you ultimately decide to switch providers, you wouldn’t have to change all your email addresses. I’m hoping to have that available within the next few months.That’s pretty much how addy.io works, I think their technology is also open source? At least free for selfhosted use, I never looked into the license itself.
Just had a look at your service and it sounds quite compelling. I’m just wondering how the “not a bot” sender confirmation works - would they essentially get an autoreply where they have to solve a captcha, click on a specific link or whatnot?
I’m curios how that works with senders that aren’t individuals but e.g. services I’m signing up for.
Any label you only want real people to send email to, you would enable screening, and they’ll get an autoreply with a link. Right now it’s just a link, but if I need to in the future, I could add a captcha.
Any label that you use for signing up somewhere, you wouldn’t enable screening, so that way they can send automated emails to you there. If you use an address for a label that doesn’t exist, it gets created as a “pending label”. Then you can approve or block it (or ignore it and it eventually gets deleted).
How is this patented? I had a professor show us how to do this in college.
The patented part is that you can have multiple email addresses for the same user, and a subset of them can provide challenge-response screening to filter automated messages. The patent is publicly available on the USPTO website.
I just signed up to the waiting list. So how long do you plan to operate? And how do I know you are not reading my emails? I used to live in Escondido lol.
Let’s say I had an established company …not X…let’s call it company “awesome”. So your plan seems interesting because I could route awesome.com to you and then you handle the labels. Is that the plan? That way I don’t have the send all my clients a new labeled email for every employee?
I don’t have any plans to cease operations, and I have enough capital to continue operation without profit for several years. Hopefully by then I’ll be profitable, though!
I don’t actively monitor any of my users emails. The only things that would justify reading any user’s email is if they are exhibiting suspicious activity or another user reports them. As far as whether you can know that, unfortunately there’s nothing I can do to assure you other than put it in my terms of service and privacy policy. Any email service that receives emails unencrypted from other senders technically has the ability to read your emails, even ones like ProtonMail that then encrypt the email for storage.
Yeah, basically the plan is to offer a full business email service. Each of your employees would have their own “bare” address, which could then be decorated with their own labels. So an employee named John Doe could have johndoe-somevendor@awesome.com for communicating with Some Vendor.
I’ll also have available the standard features like mailing lists (like sales@awesome.com), user management, security and data retention policies, etc.
Just a reminder for anyone concerned about potential FSF involvement that Free Software Foundation Europe has no ties to FSF or Stallman.
I’m out of the loop what is the issue with the non EU FSF and Stallman (I assume this is about Richard?)
deleted by creator
Probably something about toenails
All the service! Who ever wins gets storage, key wallet, VPN and email. Thats pretty fucking good.
I really hope Ladybird is able to eventually become a strong alternative browser engine to Chromium.
only for it to be a safari wrapper on ios…
Hopefully not in the EU.
Cool. I bailed on Proton for Tuta because the value wasn’t there for me.
I’ll be buying a ticket to support the various orgs, and I’d definitely use the lifetime sub if I somehow won. It’s cool of them to offer it.
How does your experience with Tuta compare to Proton? Was it a good move?
I think so. Initially it was pretty rough, but they’ve been actively improving things, so it’s better now. Once they finish implementing labels (soon?), I think it’ll have everything I need.
Some downsides:
- must use their client - not an issue for me, but could bother others; their app isn’t as nice as proton’s IMO
- no extra apps, just email and calendar
- no good way to export data - they’re improving this, but it’s still a pain
The reasons I switched are:
- cheaper family plan - I’m currently the only one on it, but I could add more accounts for €3/month
- 3 custom domains - I currently use two, one for family and friends, and the other for online spam; I could probably use aliases, but I want it to be easy to switch if Tuta does anything I don’t like; I’d have to get the top Proton tier for that
- I didn’t actually use the other services anyway - I tried the VPN, but I honestly prefer Mullvad anyway, and I don’t need VPN always right now
That said, Proton ultimate is a decent deal if you commit for 2 years. I just decided I’d give Tuta a shot and they’re pretty reasonable.
I wish Tuta supported throwaway email addresses. If it did it would be nearly perfect.
I DIY it with my custom domain.
Careful /u/hperrin has a patent
I need to figure out how to do that.
Tuta walks you through it, and I’m guessing Proton does as well. Basically:
- Buy domain
- Add to your email service (need a paid Proton or Tuta sub)
- Configure your DNS entries as per your email services instructions
- Create as many aliases as you want and have fun! I separate things into buckets, so shopping, games, etc, but feel free to go wild
You could also DIY the email service, but you’d have to look up the DNS settings to not get blacklisted by other email services. And even then, they could do an IP blacklist, so IMO it’s worth paying for a reputable service.
Cool, thanks for the guide.
I already have Tuta. I used to have Skiff and that allowed you to create unlimited aliases with their domain. Alas, it was never meant to last as they were always owned by venture capital.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Right now we need organisations fighting for software and media freedom more than ever. The unholy alliance of big corporations and far-right politics is just getting going, and if we don’t have alternatives to communications run by unethical corporations we’ll be driven into silence while they control all messaging. So this seems like a worthwhile donation.
It’s a great idea for a way to encourage donations to these projects.
Got my tickets a few days ago, hoping for a win!
Just got one myself! 🤞
I bought a ticket, thanks for the post. I don’t expect to win, but it’d be cool if I did and it’s a good excuse to send $10 to some cool projects
I’m in for one ticket.
I’ve once bought lifetime service - couchsurfing. It didn’t stick foe less than 1 year. I have second life time account for 2600 magazine but still I’m skeptical to “life time” promotions
Plex lifetime has lasted me a long long time, maybe around 10-12 years, so even if it somehow stops now it’s more than made up for what I paid for it
life time subscriptions always gets cripled as time goes by, to the point they become useless. Like forcing you to top up, or even worse to abandon and get a monthly plan for new features.
Thats okay. They aren’t selling life time though, but only raffle them away during promotions. So in this case they probably are sustainable, but the chance to get one is next to zero (unless you buy them off of someone else, as that is a thing proton supports).
I got a lifetime 2600 subscription in 2009.
Every quarter they still send another issue.
Thanks, bought a few too
Pure bullshit And people loves to eat it
Care to elaborate?
