Ask Lemmy

That was largely gut-level analysis for my personal decision-making but here are a few of the things I considered:

1. Value proposition in the context of acquisition, featuring a heavily-marketed privacy brand and a base of privacy-conscious users (harder to profile, more expensive data)
2. Obfuscation of funding sources via ‘venture philanthropy’ non-profit (a la OpenAI) housing closed-doors for-profit operations
3. Rapid expansion to full-coverage consumer productivity cloud platform alternatives (vpn, mail, drive, calendar, wallet, passwords, etc)
4. Weird pattern of being blocked then let through without future contest by numerous data-hungry entities including thiel, and generally just allowed in a few too many privacy-unfriendly places for my taste
5. And the usual reservations re: privatized privacy and commercial OSS

Again sorry that’s all hand-wavy. Probably shouldn’t have thrown shade without something more concrete.

Not OP, but I left for similar reasons. The CEO publically supported the Republican admin (mildly, but even at the time, stupidly). The statement sent out about it after the fact was also sus, but not really super bad.

I left anyway. I'd rather not pay a CEO to publically support the administration that is specifically targeting my family for political points.

I also heard a lot of fear mongering on the fediverse about how their new AI conversations can't be private because it gets to their servers directly, but I couldn't find anyone reasonable online who actually looked into it and confirmed that.

So like, they've got all the ingredients for more stupidity, and as we've seen time and again, everything pressuring them to fuck up/enshitify is also there in the background too.