The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders.
Is there a fediverse answer to email? Like what mastodon is to twitter and lemmy is for reddit?
If not, maybe the fediverse can think about allowing email-less sign-ups?
As an addendum, what about the popular tools we use in our daily lives? The calendar, note tools, etc all are products of companies driven to maximize profits.
There’s a talk in the technology sub about how GitHub was acquired by microsoft and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the only popular tool that was or will be endangered of disappearing or turning worse in the name of profit.
Is there a community movement that can somehow mitigate this? Or is there really no choice for us? Is there a complete list of FOSS somewhere that are at par or at least only mildly worse than the popular mainstream ones?
Having companies involved isn’t bad as long as there’s enough choice. There are such a huge number of email providers I think there’ll always be alternatives if one turns bad - respectfully I don’t think your fears are realistic.
Also, paying isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for example Protonmail’s paid options I think are quite reasonable for what you get and it keeps it private and ad-free, it’s a fair deal. I don’t think free providers will ever go anywhere but there is the choice.
To be honest, proton is quite expensive for what it gives. Though this might differ depending on income levels and level of comfort. But their free version is serviceable enough if your email volume isn’t that high.
I took that as an example, I’m not necessarily endorsing it as the best solution. I personally use the free package.
The bundle with VPN is what I was looking at; for full-featured email, VPN and 500 GB cloud storage from a provider with a good track record doesn’t sound bad if you don’t mind putting those eggs in one basket.
I agree, the free option is very serviceable as a backup personal email. Though there will always be a part of me that is skeptical if these free services will disappear one day.
That said, I wouldn’t put everything in one basket. As I recall, their VPN is slow and their cloud storage has no mobile apps. Though that might have changed since I last tried the Proton suite.
