Notices by Sean Bala (seanbala@mas.to), page 4

@georgiamuseum

Such a nice idea!

@ionafyfe Wonderful piece - hope your Canada tour is going well!

@agnes

I think you see everything they directly post but you do not see boost thank God. I have had to mute or stop getting notifications from people who are noisy.

Fun tip - if they are talking repeatedly about a particular thing (eh hem - the current state of politics in the US) you can use the filters to make it so you don’t see those posts with that content explicitly in notifications. You can stop that content and get other things.

@stephaniepixie @WrenArcher @Jennifer

I have been using this too! I have been agonizing over the emails to select. I like Tuta a lot. I might have chosen it first but it has a few UI quirks that need to be ironed out. I went with Posteo as my secure account and am probably going with Fastmail as my general account. I looked at ALL of the options on the Cyber Cleanse and Fastmail just seems to work. Most of the others are slow or require more tinkering.

@tiefling I am moving my secure mail over to Posteo and I like it a lot. I have spent A LOT of time looking at providers. I went with Posteo over Proton and Tuta because it could connect with Thunderbird, has excellent and clear pricing, and good ethics. I like Tuta but it is too fiddly. Proton feels like it spends way too much time trying to upsell you. I’m finally created a Mailfence account and while it has a better UI than Mailbox.org, its pricing feels opaque.

@brenttoderian.bsky.social I'm from south of the border so I know we have our own problems but I find Poilievre so intensely off-putting and strange. Politics aside, he seems like one of the most inauthentic people you'll ever encounter. Now that I think about it, he reminds me a lot of Ted Cruz.

@impermanen_ Yes, I like it too. I like that it is built in. I also looked at StartMail but I really wanted a calendar as well.

Still on my epic quest to settle on a new #email service. I've tested out both @fastmail and @mailbox_org and it seems to me that, aside from concerns about #privacy and jurisdiction, both work about the same except one works smoother and is prettier (#Fastmail) and the other is slower and less pleasing to the eye (#Mailbox.org) - does this sound about right? In the end, if you use them on something like @thunderbird , are you really going to notice a difference?

#tech #technology #digital

@liztai Why is there an orange ball on the roof of one of the houses? I have so many questions....

@susankayequinn

I used @libreoffice in grad school and it was great. Got into Windows stuff for about a decade (❤️ Nokia Windows Phones). One day last year I realized how much space Office was taking up on my Surface Pro with very little storage (3 GB versus 700 MB). Reinstalled LO and have been very happy. The AI madness at Microsoft has been leading me to gradually get rid of as much Microsoft stuff as I can. It's a task because I have used MS services heavily.

@madopal

That's a DEEP #Chicago / #Illinois cut, my friend....

Second, I just get this icky feeling for how much Proton pushes upgrades. I feel like there are some shady business tactics where they have made their lower priced offerings purposefully confusing to get people to upgrade to Unlimited. I dislike services where they have made it sufficiently annoying enough to push you to upgrade. It just feels unethical. I know it is their business but out of the 7 services I looked at, the aggression they push things is a bit much.

4/6

I can't explain why but there was something I really liked about Posteo. It just seems like a good company. A bit Solarpunk, actually. I just felt like my more secure things would be safe there. I'm still looking at doing another service. I'm leaning towards @fastmail because of usability. Something I read is that you can protect against corporate actors and governmental actors in one's threat assessment. FM seems good for the former. Tried @mailbox_org but it feels too slow.

5/6

Again, it would probably be more convenient simply purchase Proton and have everything centralized. But some of the business practices I highlighted, and the desire to spread things out across some services led me to step away from them for now.

Sorry to take up so much of your time - as I said, I've been thinking WAY too much about this.

6/6

But I'll admit that there are two other factors that hold me back from Proton. First, I just don't need all the services. I probably need Mail, Drive, and Calendar but I really don't need a VPN, Pass, or their crypto wallet
(EEK!). I like the idea of distributing my stuff around and trying to use open source when possible. I use @bitwarden for my passwords and I am very happy with them. I also signed up for Firefox Relay for aliases (only problem is that you can use them for one account).

3/6

Another example is calendars. From what I can see, you can't share a Proton calendar with a non-Proton account. If I went to Proton, I would probably need to keep Google Calendar to sync calendars with my spouse. I'm more concerned about tech stuff and privacy things than she is so I just don't think I could convince her to move. And I think the price for Proton Duo is just too high for us.

2/6

@solarpunkpresents @protonprivacy Thanks for the reply! I've really agonized over the options. I think it comes down to a few factors. What I meant by usability is that services like Proton and Tuta, in the interest of security, have restrictions on them. For example, they require you to use their apps. I would like to be able to centralize my mail with something like Thunderbird. You can use the Proton bridge but from what I read it is a bit clunky.

1/6

@noellemitchell Sigh. I hope Google gets its European anti-trust suits dropped due to tariff pressures as a reward for this stupidity.

@pockets I'm doing in @Vivaldi with tracking protection and U Origin Lite and Duck Duck Go tracking protection. I wonder if those could be a factor? I'm using an Outlook.com account so I don't think it would be rejected.

@rafaelm7o @fastmail @mailbox_org @startmail @mailfence

I tried signing up to try it out but the service locked me out. I think I tried signing up twice in quick succession so my IP address is banned.