As encryption happens client side I think its a little bit more than cute.

Proton did not praise Trump. Their CEO praised a choice Trump made. You’re obviously free to consider Yen’s word equal to Proton’s word but this isn’t true for everybody.

They are like Apple: telling people what they want to hear about privacy, and we all swallowed the pill.

Unlike Apple, Proton’s software being open source (and by extension their promises) can be vetted by anybody with the skills.

This is a fair assessment, though isn’t all the meta crap connected?

With which I mean don’t Facebook posts sync to threads and such? I know my Instagram posts synced with Facebook when I still had Facebook.

I agree the optics of this aren’t great, but the real question is if this higher follower count on Mastodon translates to post engagement…

My brother once bought me followers on Instagram as some kind of joke and that did exactly squat for reach as far as i could tell. Not saying Proton bought followers on Mastodon, but I am saying followers don’t necessarily mean anything.

Mastodon peaked a couple of times but then usage dwindled because people started using Bluesky or returning to bigtech platforms because their buddies didn’t move over. I suspect a fair amount of these mastodon subscribers are stale accounts and the Proton team just aren’t seeing the engagement they have on the other platforms.

I don’t get the “too many products” comment. Proton has always said their goal was to be a privacy first replacement for Google and not just do e-mail. The crypto wallet is a weird one as this is not among Google’s services, but i’d say their library of services otherwise perfectly follows this goal?

I feel you’re misrepresenting the second point.

Proton did not comment on Trump. Their CEO did. And specifically on liking a certain hire for a certain position because he thought that would be good for small business.

It was a garbage take for many reasons, and the community let that be known. For me that was that but people keep coming back to this as some sort of unforgivable transgression.

Liberals (among which I count myself) like to piss on Musk and buddies for not actually supporting freedom of speech even though they call themselves absolutists in this area, but drastic moves like leaving over some tweet is a plank cut from the same tree…

If you’re going to move every time somebody says something you find questionable you’re going to have a hell of a time with the average company being filled with hundreds of people and thusly hundreds of opinions. And it’s good to remember most people are going to be having these takes in background without you knowing of them.

Reddit has a tendancy to be alarmist. AFAIK there’s zero evidence to support Proton are closeted MAGA. If i’m wrong on this i’ll gladly stand corrected with some substantial evidence.