I agree with you: the FSF can seem unwavering in their stance, even in the face of practicality. I’m really sorry for this incredibly nit-picky detail, but I think practicality is ideological too. For better or for worse, we can’t escape ideas or be free from them, so we have to choose which we value. For example, while I tend to choose software freedom over practicality, I also have, at times, chosen practicality over freedom.

A friend of mine and I have gotten used to using it during our conversations. We do fast fact-checking or find a good first opinion regarding silly topics. We often find it faster than digging through search-engine results and interpreting scattered information. We have used it for thought experiments, intuitive or ELI5 explanations of topics that we don’t really know about, finding peer-reviewed sources for whatever it is that we’re interested in, or asking questions that operationalizing into effective search engine prompts would be harder than asking with natural language. We always always ask for citations and links, so that we can discard hallucinations.

It seems like you’re passionate about emojis

I agree. And that’s exactly my point 😅

Ok, so I just read upon Proton AG, the company behind Proton, and they don’t seem to owe investors money, because it was originally crowdfunded and now it finances itself with subscriptions. That sounds great! It is quite different to surveillance capitalism and enshittification (given that enshittification requires advertisers).

I am not advertising for Proton, by the way. To make that clear, I still wouldn’t use them because they seem to have very limited VPN functionality in their Linux clients. As a Linux user, I wouldn’t want that. However, if they fix that in the future, I could consider switching.

Edit: Similarly, I found this website https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tutao-gmbh summarizing its evaluation of Tutanota as ethical. It takes into consideration its ownership structure. Unfortunately, I cannot find details because there is a paywall for the information, but it could be the case that Tutanota does not owe money to investors and therefore is not seeking to maximize profits but rather provide a good service while compensating fairly its workers. I wish I could have more evidence.

I like that, if I only need mail with 20gb of storage, Tutanota is cheaper.

I don’t know what to do. I’ll have to think a bit longer.

Hence my question :) If there are investors waiting for returns, you bet (and, like, actually, you do in fact bet) they will get more expensive. If it’s a social enterprise, I wouldn’t worry as much.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply!

I have also chatted with Tutanota workers and I didn’t have the impression that they were not driven. In fact, I think about myself: if I was a good enough developer, experienced with their stack, I’d love to work with them just for what they stand up for regarding privacy and openness. It seems like a very gratifying way of spending my time.

As to the closed platforms, I totally agree with your criticism in purely abstract terms; I don’t like that I need to rely on Tutanota for encrypted email instead of a federated system like XMPP or Matrix. However, Matrix has been an aspirational platform in which only my closest friends, and the wokest or tech-savvy acquaintances join. For a good chunk of my daily life, if I want libre, metadata-reduced, and encrypted communication, I have to rely on Tutanota’s closed email system.

Do you think there’s a way of extending email (rather than “reinventing the wheel”) that’s also as simple as “give me your email and let’s agree on a password”?

I was thinking about incentives and motivations. Are they motivated by profits?

I was also thinking about how sometimes listening to everyone in a team can save them from failure. Do Proton and Tutanota listen to everyone?

Not necessarily :)

Except a restaurant is not asking to log every word of yours in exchange for pizza.

Thanks for the recommendation. I didn’t know such little reduction in quality meant so much savings with JPGs and PNGs!

Yeah. Avif gave me some nasty artifacts on some pictures that I wanted to save long term. Not using it anytime soon… or at least until those issues are fixed.

Why do you dislike WebP? I can see that it isn’t widely used, so if longevity is my goal JPGs and PNGs are a better bet. But am I missing something about WebP?

Seeing this post again made me think, apart from my previous reply, about something else.

I think your “popularity of software” argument is great because it probably holds true, in that an investment in finding an exploit has larger returns if the exploitable software is widely used. But rather than thinking in terms of apps, we could think in terms of operating systems. What if the vector of infection is not an app and rather is an OS? This is perfectly possible and there are massive incentives to find such exploits since this is not app-dependent.

This means that merely using iOS or Android in any capacity (either through Lineage OS or perhaps even Replicant) could be enough for infection. And so far, not knowing what the vectors of infection are for Pegasus, this is perfectly possible.

Perhaps using Linux OS is a good idea, given it’s not as popular.