53 points

I was really dissatisfied that notes are always somehow weirdly shared with a propriatary backend. There is jtx Board which uses your CalDAV calendar (Nextcloud, Radicale, etc.) as a backend which is really cool. The UI is also OK, but there seems to be no (Linux) desktop app for that.

So I started https://github.com/jeena/JNotes because I was curious about developing for GNOME anyway. It’s going very slowly - because I am a stay at home dad with a one year old who demands all my attention :D - but it’s going forward, but I guess it’ll take another year before it’s usable ^^.

Actually I was hoping that there would be more notes apps using standard backends like CalDAV or IMAP, but it’s almost impossible to find something, everyone seems to want to implement their own backend and then charge for the synchronization.

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10 points

None of those standards are e2e

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-3 points

As long as you host it yourself it doesn’t matter.

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8 points

It’s not reasonable to assume that most people are going to self-host, or even how to go about doing that if they wanted to, but people still deserve a right to privacy and products that support that. I think that’s what they were trying to say

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47 points
*

So… this was the plan of the Standard Notes guys all along? Now it makes sense why they never made open-source and self-hosting a true priority.

Let’s see what Proton does with this, but I personally believe they’ll just integrate it in Proton and further close things even more. The current subscription-based model, docker container and whatnot might disappear as well. Proton is a greedy company that doesn’t like interoperability and likes to add features designed in a way to keep people locked their Web UI and applications.

Standard Notes for self-hosting was already mostly dead due to the obnoxious subscription price, but it is a well designed App with good cross-platform support and I just wish the Joplin guy would take a clue on how to design UIs from them instead of whatever they’re doing now that is ugly and barely usable.

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11 points
*

Doesn’t proton open source everything they do? Iirc, proton mail, calendar, vpn, drive, and simplelogin are open source under GPL v3 on github.

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11 points

Yes the clients are open source but the server part is closed and it’s a big missing part

Now, better to be 50% oss than 0%, but it’s not a community effort. Most commits are done behind the scenes and then published when app is released. This causes most pull releases to be rejected as the problem was already fixed internally months before. It’s more like “source available”

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3 points

Ah ok, yeah they should definitely be more transparent then.

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4 points
*

There’s no vendor lock in until you realize your emails are essentially hostage of their apps and a bridge that may be shutdown at any point. If you can’t simply setup a regular email client then there’s vendor lock in, not even Microsoft does that.

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6 points

They say the reason for needing their bridge is the encryption at rest, but I feel like the better way to handle wanting to push email privacy forward would be to publish (or better yet coordinate with other groups on drafting) a public standard that both clients and competing email servers could adopt for an email syncing protocol for that sort of zero-access encryption that requires users give their client a key file. A bridge would be easier to swallow as a fallback option until there’s wider client support rather than as the only way.

A similar standard for server-to-server communication, like for automatic pgp key negotiation, would be nice too.

Still, Proton has a easy to access data export that doesn’t require a bridge client or subscription or anything. I think that’s required by GDPR. It’s manual enough to not be an effective way to keep up-to-date backups in case you ever abruptly lose access but it’s good enough to handle wanting to migrate to another provider.

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6 points

Huh? This is not true. Proton have an app that exports all your emails for reimport into the platform of your choice.

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5 points

I think proton bridge is open source as well. I have all my emails locally on thunderbird

https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge

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36 points

good for them, love to see proton continuing there growth I pay for protonmail plus and definitely am happy to do so, for actual private email

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10 points

I pay for the same but may go down to their free tier. After a purge of email and emails with larger attachments I’m down to less than 500mb. The only thing I dislike on the free tier is their automated signature to advertise proton. I hardly ever send emails though so not too much of an issue.

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9 points

I went with Pro for the custom domains and catch-all inbox. Now I can give out whateveriwant@mydomain.com and it will get back to me. It’s nice for easily identifying phishing, plus you can set up filters to trash emails to a particular address automatically, so if one of your addresses gets compromised you can just filter them out. Also, it’s nice to see who’s selling your info!

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2 points

I do pay for SimpleLogin and will continue to do so. The only place my actual proton email address is exposed is on SimpleLogin. Every site I use on the internet has its own alias. That’s 350+ sites currently.

The only downside to a catchall, as I see it, is someone could just start creating any random email address knowing it will find your legitimate mailbox. Also sending as any of the aliases can be a pain.

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5 points

Keep paying so some other poor fuck has a free vpn and e-mail

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2 points

honestly half the reason I pay is mainly just to support proton. But I do also like having the ability for the more than 1 Email

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1 point

More than one email?

I don’t disagree but paying £40 a year to remove a signature seems excessive. I’d actually like to go for Unlimited but can’t justify the cost.

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35 points

Proton’s alternative to Google Docs getting closer? 👀

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12 points

It will really hard or impossible to reach the level of development that ms and google have in their cloud collaborative products. They don’t have the resources like the mentioned two monsters.

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20 points

A single coder made photopea which is near feature parity of photoshop. I think the Proton team can figure out a docs suite

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18 points

It may require intense passion and a manic episode to do something like that with one coder or a small team, which is hard to arrange bureaucratically.

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1 point

I don’t think that’s true at all.

I haven’t used only office but it looks pretty great.

Open source alternatives are always around, even if they’re a few steps behind corporate offerings.

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1 point

Sadly money marks so many things. But is a fact.

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23 points

Not surprising. Proton seems to be exploiting the niche of “privacy” . I haven’t seen anything to the contrary other than turning over metadata due to court order.

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13 points

exploiting

Yes, that’s the right word for it. :)

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3 points

True Swiss style

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