Villains of the Day - "Nobody cares that you're leaving Proton"

Today, a bit of a thing had kicked off on the Fediverse. It may have kicked off elsewhere too, but I'm not one of those terminally online types that seems to pick up on all sorts of gossip and outrages online. I mostly log on to my Mastodon account to post a good morning greeting, say something about the weather, or my day, and have a bit of a laugh with some online friends.

Then I get out of there again before I get too caught up in anything else.

This morning a topic was boosted into my timeline that I couldn't avoid seeing, from among the tech crowd (of which the fediverse has a share that might well be a majority membership). They were up in arms about Proton, the private email and many other online services company.

Apparently the CEO had been saying things (related to AI use, of course) that had upset many people who read it (via an article by 404 Media, which I won't link as it's a paywalled site, or Reddit, which I don't use) and a lot of them were doing the "that's it, this is unacceptable, I'm cancelling my Proton account" thing.

As someone who has an account on Proton, my immediate thoughts were... well surprisingly perhaps, not to have any immediate thoughts.

As with many other tech outrages, much of this knee-jerk and performative action-taking, and announcing that fact to the world within hours of the thing breaking, as if to show everyone what a paragon you are, is, I think, not really productive.

It just doesn't seem that well thought through in the modern capitalist world we live in either.

I have a filter set up for this sort of thing, because otherwise on days like this my feed can get overwhelmed by the sheer number of people talking about the same topic. So I open my settings, add 'Proton' to my VOTD filter (Villain of the Day), which mutes posts containing the filtered word for 24 hours.

Nice.

But I don't want to write a lot about it. Because Widdershins already wrote a blog post that does a fine job of articulating broadly what I think about it all already. So here is a link to his post, which I think is very good about the whole personal stances v services you're paying to use thing, if you're interested.

https://widdershins.verja.net/nobody-cares-that-youre-leaving-proton/

I don't need to agree with his politics or his opinions about AI. I don't need him to validate my worldview. I need the products I'm paying for to do what they're supposed to do, and I need the company to fulfill its obligations to its customers.

In case you were wondering, it was a lovely day, and I was planning to try a little bit of work in the garden. Although that never happened because, just at the moment, while being in limbo waiting for further heart procedures, it seems I can't really do them. I can just think of doing them.

But I can make a list.

I'm writing a lot of lists.