After months of radio silence on this blog, I have decided to write a new post. Actually, I wanted to write this post for quite some time, but I refrained to do so, first because I was lazy, second because I felt that it was not a very interesting topic and because I felt somehow pressured to write "useful" content (from the eyes of a potential reader), despite the number of readers of this blog can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Weird, I know, but I think it's a phenomenon quite common among bloggers, in which you start going in paranoia about the expectations that you imagine others having on your content.

Anyway, the reason why I decided to ultimately write this post is because this topic has been surfacing in my social bubble quite often in the past month, and the way that the conversation is conducted is also one of the reasons why I currently feel burned out from the Fediverse, and why I am probably going to take a break from it, at least in terms of active participation.

Cutting to the chase, I am going to talk about the latest online drama about Proton and its CEO, Andy Yen. Spoiler alert, I am going to discuss and elaborate the reasons why this event has not only not changed my opinion on the company of one millimeter, but has also been a factor in my exhaustion with the Fediverse, in particular with Lemmy and Mastodon.

Facts

Let's start from the facts, which I will report here at the best of my knowledge, without any commentary:

• On 4th December 2024 Andy Yen tweeted:

"Great pick by @readDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.". This tweet was quoting (?) the announcement from Trump of Gail Slater as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust.

• Somewhere in January (around 15th) 2025 social media posts started popping up that picked up the above tweet, and accused Andy Yen of various things (bending the knee, being a mask-off MAGA, etc.).
• A few hours later a post from the official Proton account on Reddit (and Mastodon, and supposedly other places) reiterated the concept expressed in the tweet. The message stated:

"Here is our official response, also available on the Mastodon post in the screenshot: Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation. Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidentally has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote. At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance. By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand. Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost. Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses."

• After some backlash, Andy Yen decided to create a separate Reddit account, called /u/andy1011000, from which he posted various comments about the topic.
• Just today, they announced via a change in their Mastodon bio that:

"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.com/r/ProtonMail"

Arguments Against

Having discussed (and spectated lots of discussions) on social media about this topic, I have heard all kinds of arguments. These include, for example, the fact that Andy Yen bent the knee (the scandal was brought up few days after Zuck & co. effectively bent the knee to Trump), that he is a MAGA, that he supported Trump, that he is a fascist, that he supports Republicans inhumane policies (like against LGBT folks, immigrants, etc.), that he thinks Republicans are the party of the common people (i.e., workers); also that Proton is going to backdoor their software happily, that Proton cannot be trusted to protect the privacy of users, and much more. My personal favorite has been seeing people suggesting that Andy Yen picked "88" (1011000 in binary) for his username as a dog-whistle to Nazis.

An example from a relatively public person.

I can explain briefly, the proton CEO has pretty much publicly come out as a fascist, even posting Nazi related symbols. When I and others have called this out, hackers have rushed to their defense because they like proton.

Since this is my blog, not a social media post, I won't spend time debating individual arguments. Instead, I will simply articulate my own opinion about this whole debacle. If my opinion happens to counter some of these arguments, so be it.

Someone published a medium article that looks at the same topic, that might be interesting for completeness.

My Own Take

In my opinion, the whole scandal is a storm in a glass of water. Let's see why:

• When I read the tweet, my first thought was that it seemed to be an endorsement for Gail Slater, who I had never heard before to be clear, even with a pinch of surprise. I did not read that tweet as a Trump endorsement in general.
• In any case, I would have maybe taken issue with such a communication if it happened during the election campaign. In that case I could still read that as an endorsement to Trump for single-issue voters (i.e., Antitrust/big tech). Doing so after the election already happened is honestly something I don't care about, because, what does it change?
• Tweets are terrible for political communication, and for the life of me I can't understand why this format is used for this purpose (same applies to Mastodon with default character limit). The short format pushed Andy Yen to compress his thought which, in turn, means he couldn't elaborate better his opinion, and ended up writing something ambiguous. It's reasonable that someone will read the tweet and think Andy suggested Republicans are the party of common people. I personally still framed it within that context, but the tweet is objectively ambiguous. However, he explicitly said what he thinks with more words and more clarity in a Reddit comment.
• Likewise, he also clarified that his was not a Trump endorsement, but a Gail Slater endorsement.
• I dislike the twitter-borne attitude to "gotcha" people, where no chance is given to people to clarify or elaborate their thoughts. Some people will say "he went into damage control", but I honestly didn't see him backing down from his opinion even a little, he simply clarified want he meant. People have the right to refine their opinions, and we should judge them for what they mean. His tweet is not an example of good communication, but if later he explains his position better, I have no reason to "gotcha" him with his first words to score internet hero points. This applies to everyone, of course.
• Proton has never (thankfully!) been neutral politically when it comes to antitrust. While it can (and should) be debated whether Gail Slater is or is not a "good pick" for the position, thinking either way is a legitimate position, especially since at that point it was all speculation. If it happens that Trump, or republicans, have a chance to make things slightly better in a narrow area, I will celebrate that since the alternatives are worse. In fact, I believe that making a scandal about praising a specific decision from Trump is a sign of the completely toxic political debate in the US (and therefore in online spaces, especially the ones very US-dominated like the Fediverse). While it doesn't make sense for me, or other people to praise individual small decisions from Trump on a specific subject, missing the 99% of idiotic, harmful or worse decisions, it does make sense for an organization (or their CEO) which focuses on that specific subject. In other words, if Proton's political involvement is limited to privacy, big tech monopolies and adjacent subjects, it makes sense to have them (or their CEO) praise a specific decision in these areas, without considering that praise an implicit agreement to all other decisions in other subjects (which is an argument that could be made in other cases).
• Either way, even if this was a complete bend-the-knee situation like with Zuck, and Andy Yen was a complete MAGA drooling over Trump, it wouldn't matter nearly as much as it does in the case of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Why? For two reasons mostly:
  • The first has to do with the type of products the company sells. Proton does not produce content, does not curate content. Their products inherently don't have the power to manipulate users the way Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or TikTok do. Which means that for Proton there are no "content policies" that can be changed like Facebook did to reflect the political alignment to Trump, no ways to shape the reality perceived by users according to the ideology supported by the company.
  • The second is that Andy Yen ceded voluntarily the control of the Proton company to a no-profit. He sits in the board of this no-profit together with people I highly respect, like Carissa Veliz and Sir Tim Berners Lee. This means that even if Andy Yen wanted to cosplay Zuck, he wouldn't have the chance to do it.
• In general to me substance matters more than form. Nothing changed in the Proton product. No legal document was changed. Nothing changed in the kind of organizations they donate money to. Essentially, nothing changed except the CEO expressed an opinion. A debatable opinion, but an opinion he is entitled to have and to express and that can be debated in the merit. For many people the fact that he did express his opinion (and somehow the fact that it was repeated - later disowned - by an official account) is a problem. This is something I really don't get. Why not knowing that opinion changes anything? If anything, I want to know what the people leading the companies I use think. The fact that they may keep their opinions private to avoid customers reaction is not something I see as desirable at all.
• Some people dug into the history of Gail Slater and reported that she might not be so well-positioned to fight Big Tech after all. This is great, this is I think the only type of argument that makes sense in the context. Andy Yen's opinion about Slater can be debated and in general we can all form opinions based on her actions. However, overestimating/underestimating certain parts of her history doesn't make anybody a fascist, a Nazi, a MAGA or anything else.

Fediverse Burnout

Why would I talk about the Fediverse in a post about Proton? Because my experience in the Fediverse around this topic has exhausted me for several reasons, which I will try to highlight.

The Fediverse is generally a progressive place, something many people call a "safe space". That said, I personally over time found that the effort to free a place from "bad actors" derails into toxic positivity or an extreme echo chamber where any thought slightly diverging is met as aggressively as "bad actors", reinforcing the cultural norm.

In fact, I could even say that to some extent the Fediverse is a cult for some people, or anyway it becomes the way some people feel they are practicing political activism, with all the emotional baggage this implies.

For example, everyone hates Nazis (well, most reasonable people). However, calling someone a Nazi is a heavy accusation, something that I - despising Nazis - would do very carefully. Which means if someone calls a random person a Nazi, I would probably want to make sure that person deserves it, due to the gravity that connotation has for me.

Which brings me to the Proton debacle: honestly, calling Andy Yen a fascist for his tweet for me is not only unfair, it is completely absurd. Actually, I am on my blog, it's completely idiotic. Even more, it is insulting. Italians carry the heavy burden of having invented that word, my relatives suffered from fascism and some of them shot fascists during Italian resistance. Calling someone a fascist because he tweeted an opinion waters down the term, insults everyone's intelligence.

However, given the fact that the people in the Fediverse tend to really make a "safe space", a fascist accusation is also final, which means that debating that accusation is in itself considered the defense of a fascist, and hence automatically labels you as a bad actor. Once this mechanism kicked in, you can expect dogpiling and a storm of people who will completely ignore your words and just go with the flow (because you don't argue with a fascist. Yes, it's circular reasoning).

This dynamic is obviously not exclusive to the Fediverse, but it is particularly evident here because such a high percentage of the people either really care deeply about issues or need to show that they care deeply about them.

This means for example that you are the one who needs to argue that the Tweet quoted does not "support Trans genocide" (the reasoning being → tweet supports Trump → Trump is carrying out a Trans genocide → the person who tweeted supports the Trump genocide). It doesn't matter that the Tweet was historically antecedent the day Trump actually took power, it doesn't matter that nothing in the tweet even remotely touches the subject. Anything which is not blind support to a statement that matches the aesthetics of fighting against Trans genocide is considered supporting it.

In this context I had to argue for example that Andy Yen likely (nobody can ever be certain) did choose "88" in his username because he is born in 1988 and because he is Taiwanese, and 88 is a lucky number in his culture. I had to argue this because the moment the witch hunt started, the polarizing mechanism already kicked in, and once the accusation "Nazi dog-whistle" was thrown out, debating it was equivalent to defending a Nazi.

In fact, I will even go one step further: I found this particular argument borderline racist. Many people argued that "he should know that is offensive to a lot of the customer base [adding 88 to their username]" and similar arguments, or completely ruled out any other possibility besides the fact that a CEO dealing with a PR crisis decides to create a username with a Nazi dog-whistle. Solely arguing against the slim chance this accusation had any substance was enough to be labeled a Nazi apologist, because calling someone a Nazi - as I said - is final and doesn't need proof.

This perspective completely stomps over the personal cultural references that person might have, or worse, establishes a hierarchy between the important culture (i.e., "my own", the western one) and a less important one (i.e., "his own"). If I were in the Fediverse I would call such thing "white suprematism" but I won't, because I don't think it's that. Instead, I think the complete focus on making an environment completely harmless ends up making it completely culturally uniform to the point that other cultures are discriminated against. To be even more clear, 8 is a lucky number in China and Taiwan, and if someone can't process this fact and interpret related symbolism accordingly, this is their problem.

Overall the whole thing could be summarized as a complete lack of nuance and impossibility to look at facts rationally. Stating this very sentence in the Fediverse will likely earn you a response like "fascists are taking the government, this is not time for nuance, neutrality, etc." or a similar jingle. As if my post of Mastodon changed anything, or if I - an Italian living in Europe - should live in exactly the same way that an American living in the US does.

I find this whole dynamic exhausting, and I think as a result I simply burned out. I used to be a firm believer in the Fediverse, and to some extent I still am: I think that Federated and distributed social media, run without profit motive, is the future, or at least a better option. However, I can't stand anymore the cultist attitude, the constant repetition of slogans that are used as mental shortcuts and the constant witch hunts and purity tests.

Proton Abandons Mastodon

When I decided to write this post, this didn't happen yet, so it's a very nice coincidence that can help me reassert the above point. I have already reported the statement in the Proton bio on Mastodon where they say that they are not going to publish on Mastodon anymore.

As it is easy to imagine, the reactions have not been positive. Honestly, I don't understand why someone would care about where a company pushes their marketing material (because this is basically all it got posted). Once again, it is a formality, but what does it change in practice? They have a newsletter, which uses email (open and distributed format) that accomplishes the same.

Anyway, for some people this is a reason to abandon the platform. Now, everyone can make their own choices as they please, of course, but I honestly find it hilarious that someone would drop a service because they decide to stop posting on a social media they like (and keep posting where they always have, on Reddit).

It is even more ironic that this exit has been interpreted by many as "not supporting open principles" (open what?) or "enshittification". It is of course useless to point out that just less than a month ago Proton run their yearly charity fundraising and donated a million (in total) to various organizations, including FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) or OpenStreetMap. I think it is possible to argue that an actual cash donation to an organization which promotes free software does more for "open principles" than having an account on Mastodon (with automated reposting - yes, for some people this would be enough).

Unfortunately, now the main aesthetic of the Fediverse and the ethos of creating a "safe space" includes dunking on Proton, so that's what most people feel pressured to do.

Why I would leave Proton

Some people reading this post will no-doubt accuse me of being a Proton-fanboy, corporate shill, Proton bot, bootlicker or worse (maybe a Nazi apologist, who knows). For this, I will clearly mention a non-exhaustive list of reasons that would make me drop Proton in a second.

• A change in the privacy policy that would include any form of data collection that I cannot clearly justify as necessary to provide the service.
• The introduction of ads, profiling or any other technology aimed at generating any profit besides my subscription.
• A revert in the organizational structure that ceded control from the nonprofit to another organization (e.g., selling, IPO).
• A change in the Proton foundation board that included members with a track record for any of the above.
• An actual proved discovery of malicious intent from the company (i.e., not a compromise) to backdoor encryption or in any case violate the privacy of the users.
• A clear statement from Andy Yen or the board of the Proton foundation that they are going to align with policies I strongly disagree with (e.g., discriminating against specific users) or a clear proof that they did so.

There are for sure more reasons, but this list is fairly comprehensive when it comes to events adjacent to the ones described in this post. Until then, I am going to stay with Proton, and I will continue recommending it together with Tuta, Posteo and similar services.

I believe the mission of taking away power from Big Tech is more important than purity testing on social media, so any person who drops Google in favor of Proton (or Tuta, etc.) is a political win. They are not perfect (Linux Drive client!), but I won't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Conclusion

This is a personal post with lots of disconnected thoughts. I tried to put together an overview of why I strongly disagree with the drama that was created around Andy Yen's tweet, and I tried it to discuss it together with the dynamics that often happen in the Fediverse around similar topics.

Hopefully this is the first post that will sign the beginning of me expressing my thoughts independently in my own corner of the internet rather than on social media (any social media).

That said, I am still interested in constructive discussions, including hard disagreements, as long as supported by arguments; so if you find an error, want to propose a correction, or you simply have any kind of comment and observation, feel free to reach out via email or via Mastodon (priority to email).