Just opening discussion, haha!
I mean if non-proton conversation isn’t allowed, I’m just comparing, haha lol!
Okay seriously though.
The three services I’m exploring are:
- Email (with email aliases)
- VPN
- Cloud Storage
I think that, if we want something fash-resistant we probably need something by a worker co-op where the whole org has to be fash to be a problem. I’m not aware of such services. A non-profit like Proton is next on the list. I’m not aware of another non-profit email provider. Tuta seems interesting but they’re for-profit.
Also any of those should be based somewhere in Europe since the US regulatory regime is weak and about to get weaker. Email isn’t end-to-end encrypted so its privacy depends on the regulatory regime of the provider.
It’s times like this that make me thankful Lemmy is written by a bunch of tankies, even if they’ve banned me.
Honesly, Lemmy Dev’s political opinion is irrelevent, thet don’t control anything outside of lemmygrad and lemmy.ml
They tried to though. Dessalines was trying to hard code a very egregious set of censored “hate” words into the Lemmy back end for a while before the (still tiny) community threw a huge shit fit about it.
If Dessalines doesn’t like hate speech, why is his second in command doing it?
Yea, that isn’t gonna fly in modern day Lemmy. I’m sure there are non-tankie programmers that are willing to work on a fork, that’d definitely splinter Lemmy into 2 different “fediverses”, one under the tankie branch, one under the new non-tankie fork. I don’t think the devs want that. They seem to be very anti-corporate, and such a move that would splinter the Lemmy community would only benefit big tech.
Email:
- mailbox.org
- tuta
- hushmail
VPN:
- astrill (expensive but awesome)
- mullvad
Cloud storage:
Rent a small server / vps and set up your own nextcloud instance. Even some packages meant for webhosting work, as long as you can install custom php applications. I’m using all-inkl.com (private plus package) and got 500GB allocated to my nextcloud instance.
astrill (expensive but awesome)
Rule No. 1 when it comes to VPNs: NEVER trust a VPN service that claims to be anonymous. VPNs aren’t anonymous. Only Tor is anonymous.
They all claim to be anonymous. And yeah, nobody can independently validate the no logs policy, even Mullvad that has been security audited doesn’t let anyone near their production environment, so what they release to the testers might not be identical to what they use live.
Calling TOR anonymous is a big stretch through, a bunch of commits to the code have been traced back to the CIA if I remember correctly, and various intelligence agencies worldwide are running exit nodes and log everything they can get their hands on. Whether they can decrypt it with current tech is another story, but you better believe they don’t just delete it.
What makes astrill special? Since they are really expensive.
Their absolute BS marketing. They claim to make you anonymous, which is impossible for a VPN provider. Never trust a service that claims such bullshit.
Interesting, they even host their own Mastodon instance.
Personally, for a vpn, I really like airvpn. It has been around for ages. It’s not huge. It’s (seems to be) run by some very nice and super tech-savy people.
No, it’s not the fastest. Their default VPN client (eddie, which is just openvpn heavily customized, and is open source) can be clunky, but they support wireguard and regular openvpn connections with a generated config.
A lot of people use it for, uh, sharing Linux iso’s, but as a regular VPN service they are pretty awesome as well. They even have a way to tunnel their VPN connection over tor (https://airvpn.org/tor/) which is quite handy depending on where you are. And the Android client can spoof your GPS info to the country where their server is located.
As far as cloud storage goes, run my own nas, and have wireguard tunnel to my house which allows me to access it for any of my cloud storage needs.
