Proton: “We’re consolidating our social media presence due to limited resources and no longer posting on Mastodon. Follow us on Reddit for the latest updates: Reddit - Dive into anything”.
This is unexpected, as they had around 50k subscribers on Mastodon, and mirroring posts is super easy. I find that concerning that they stopped posting on open and decentralized platform, but keep posting on Meta and X.
Again?
Any company would also stop posting if the entire platform was just rabidly after their CEO because they read a shitty headline rather than listen reasonably.
The comment section of this post is ample evidence of Mastodon being the same unwelcoming place it always was: Proton: "Recent US State Department budget cuts have unfor…" - Mastodon
I wonder why Bluesky is still being used. Must be something about the people on the platform, no?
People should just self host, that way all their data is with someone they hopefully like.
Any company should be prepared to face backlash and questions, this is not a valid excuse.
And, they are still on X and even on TikTok where they have barely 400 subscribers.
Proton keeps dropping the ball and the fanboys keep giving them a pass.
Cannot confirm from any source. Will be relisted when included.
Check their mastodon page. It says it in the bio.
We’re consolidating our social media presence due to limited resources and no longer posting on Mastodon. Follow us on Reddit for the latest updates: Reddit - Dive into anything
Not a fan at all. Started a thread to ask PG to highlight issues with Providers like Proton and Tuta, and got called an idiot for not blindly trusting them, then the thread was delisted. For me, Proton is masquerading as a service they are not, hiding behind technical jargons and “swiss privacy”.
Just don’t think Mastodon is usable at all with all the server moderators being so autocratic and fragile, and users even more so. Too black and white for a platform, no nuance. Xitter and Bluesky succeed because the platform isn’t fully run by narcissistic idiots (or in case of Xitter, run by a narcissist who won’t interfere with most things unrelated to him directly, still better than Mastodon).
I find all of these platforms as outrage machines whether be it centralized or decentralized. I feel saner that I don’t have to be angry over what people said or did not said.
I help admin a Mastodon instance with about 1.5K active users a month. For the most part, I don’t need to go out of my way to moderate things that aren’t blatant bots.
That all said -
In my 10+ years of social media usage across every mainstream platform and some not-mainstream ones, I would say I see the same behavior patterns from all platforms I’ve interacted on: a lot of vocal people who don’t have nuance because most of the time you don’t have the character limit available to be able to have a nuanced take. You get a lot of hot takes from everyone. Admins and mods need to foster a healthy environment, just like on forums, if we want to be able to have decent conversation online.
Saying Mastodon isn’t usable is like saying the internet isn’t usable because web hosting companies can take down websites they don’t like.
It’s just not true.
Mastodon does have a real UX problem because they don’t make how it works very clear to users, unfortunately. But if you research and choose a neutral instance (like how website operators should research their hosting providers) or if you self-host you will encounter 0 censorship issues.
It seems bizarre that of all the available options for posting content they would choose Reddit, who just last year was criticized in a FTC report for being sloppy with user data.
Not to mention, often Reddit users cannot even visit the site if they are using ProtonVPN.
Maybe it is not for me to say because I don’t ingest a lot of Reddit content, but on it’s face it seems like an odd choice for Proton.
And PG has a YouTube channel. All balances and tradeoffs.
Staying on mainstream websites makes sense for Proton, because they are trying to get normal people to sign up for their products
Yes, that is exactly why. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. Web is also not usable for the exact same reason and bad search engines.
The UX is horrible as you note: Choose a server → discover server admin blocks half the other servers → go to more neutral servers → feed flooded with garbage instead of curation → try to find a niche server → find it hogged by same bad server admins.
I don’t think any random sysadmin should dictate what I should see, same as I don’t like big tech doing it. If I don’t like something, I block.
Sounds like we’re doomed then 
Waiting for the asteroid reset, but the chances of a hit keep dropping 
Everything’s been said and that’s one of the main problems with decentralisation, that every administrator feels all-powerful by dictating their own rules, which are often crap.
I’m much more in agreement with a social network like X where I can see almost everything without being censored than Mastodon where censorship is more than present.
Not to mention the interface, the lack of personality as tech, general information and the emptiness of Mastodon, really damaging.
I just checked and Proton hasn’t posted once in the last 13 days. Looks like they gave up there as well.
