Everyone bases their opinion off that one out-of-context tweet, but if you actually take the time to evaluate the context you’ll find it’s extremely unlikely that Andy Yen (Proton CEO) is a “Trump supporter”. At worst, he is a rationalist who wants to continue Proton’s work with the US administration regardless of who is president, rather than having a tantrum and trying to virtue signal boycott and achieve nothing for 4+ years. Unfortunately a lot of people on the left would rather circlejerk in their online cope chambers like Lemmy and Bluesky rather than actually engage with reality.

“I…am Steve (Jobs).”

They say when a boycott meets a girlcott, a baby cot is born…

MELVIN USED MORAL SUPERIORITY

BUT IT FAILED

IT HURT ITSELF IN ITS CONFUSION

What is a widely-known fact? From the “uH yEaH” you sound like you’re trying to argue with me but I’m not really sure what your point is. I never said piracy can’t be a service issue, what I said is that people who trot this line out literally every single time to defend their pirating should follow through when piracy becomes more convoluted and time consuming than the legal alternative. Many don’t, the line has become a convenient catch-all cop out that people hide behind so they can pretend acquiring everything for free makes them some kind of morally superior consumer activist. I wasn’t having a go at OP specifically, but the logical conclusion when you get to their point should be to give up and pay or rent through a library or something.

If I really couldn’t find something and I was really that desperate, I’d just try to buy it somewhere. Assuming it’s also difficult to buy, I’d be looking at online marketplaces and op shops. If pirates are going to keep hiding behind the “piracy is a service problem” line then at some point they do need to admit that paying for the product is actually the more sensible and straightforward option if they have reached a deadend elsewhere.

Possibly, although it hasn’t stopped people from doing it in the past.

The majority of their servers support port forwarding. “Only available on paid tiers” is a completely meaningless crticism, because a) you wouldn’t use a free VPN for torrenting unless you were an absolute moron and b) very few VPNs support torrenting in the first place because it requires so many resources. If you want a good VPN with port forwarding, you need to pay for it. Nothing about this makes Proton VPN “fishy”.

As the other person said, the owners of PIA also own several other VPNs and their history prior to this was pretty bad. One of the biggest selling points for PIA, the “no logging tested in court” claim, also occured before these new owners took over so it’s questionable whether that is as believable today. A big part of trust in privacy-related software comes from financial incentives and motivations driven by the business model, and the parent company does not have a good track record in terms of prioritising security and privacy above financial gain.

I believe Private Internet Access also offers this feature if people need a cheaper alternative, although it comes with tradeoffs regarding trust and ethics.

Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.

You are ignoring the bit where this was a private conversation. They wouldn’t need to laugh along with jokes at their expense because, in the context you are discussing, they would never even be aware that the jokes were made.

Is this a copypasta?

But many people don’t want to have everything completely public

This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.

Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.

My problem isn’t that rhetoric targeting anti-Trump Americans is mean but that it’s counterproductive.

Typing this after you’ve just whined about “Europeans” is peak irony. You guys are so fucking clueless.

Many of your examples are just the US fucking up the lives of citizens in other countries. The average American at home does not give a fuck about the people being murdered by his government, he isn’t going to skip a day of work to protest against that. I think maybe you are forgetting how much Americans loved the idea of invading Iraq, for instance. It took a long time for support to decrease, and even then it was only to like 50/50 levels. Americans weren’t the ones protesting against that war, it was the rest of the world who saw it for what it was. When it comes to foreign affairs the American citizen has consistently been blinded by a mixture of patriotism, ignorance and the myth of American exceptionalism.

Why shouldn’t they be? Americans have long had a superiority complex, always confidently mocking the problems of others around the world as if they were immune to them. It may feel bad for you now but the schadenfreude the rest of the world feels is completely justified. Frankly, the way some of you are suddenly crying about the rest of the world being mean to you is only further contributing to this image of Americans thinking they are above everyone else.

It’s actually not a very comms heavy game now. Like some players definitely enjoy their milsim call-outs and coordinating more closely with their squad, but a lot of players like myself are just totally silent. It was added to Xbox Game Pass last year, and that has introduced a ton of more casual players.

Yeah that’s fair, it’s definitely not that kind of game. A match does take quite a long time (although you are under no obligation to stay for the whole thing, again like Battlefield). Hopefully you have some free time to try it out at some point in the future, if it’s something you’re still interested in!