Yeah… so, the record high inequality is just nothing to think about, because suddenly we don’t deserve to own a house for one life’s worth of work…? What a joke take

17.66$ per hour in 1983 is equal to 50$ per hour today which is just a fine salary?

based.

And you can’t even trust that - good luck finding hardware with open source schematic that is not ancient.

All processors have built-in spyware (Management Engine etc.), and that’s not going to change, since there are only a few highly sophisticated factories in the world that can make them, and the factions controlling those have no interest in producing consumer grade spyware free hardware. Modern processors have become essential for weaponry and warfare, so this is not going to change, only get worse.

But we constantly trust though! For example, we trust intel Intel a lot by using a processor with their Management Engine - and in general, on a hardware level we trust almost blindly, open source schematics are an utter fringe. Even if I host everything myself, I have to choose a faction to belong to by which hardware I pick. The ownership and loyalty network of the hardware manufacturer means everything, and there is no neutral option there.

Some years ago I tried to buy some crowdfunded open schematic hardware, but somehow, “mysteriously”, those projects failed, even though they were double or triply funded. The problem is that the means of production for modern hardware is highly sophisticated and tightly controlled, only a few places in the world can even make modern chips and when they get requested to make chips without spyware, it is simply not done.

And this is important, because even if everything is correctly done on the software level, it doesn’t matter because the hardware level is fundamentally compromised. Verifying if a processor isn’t spying on you is almost impossible and requires professional tools and knowledge - you have to buy from a source you trust. I admit that I probably gave up too early, and a hardware nerd could figure something out - but I felt this was futile pursuit without professional knowledge.

Also, after the WhatsApp scandals my faith in encryption itself is limited. I am not a mathematician and I don’t have time to constantly read the updates of the source code for the GPG installation on all my computers. There could be a backdoor in the mathematics themselves and I wouldn’t have a clue reading the code. Then there’s the quantum computer decryption thing…

That makes absolutely no sense - at the very least, this is unimplementable for an email provider.

I am trusting someone for my data. Ownership belonging to the people running it, who just want to make a living, has the meaning that our interests are better aligned than a multinational ad agency or a nation state whose subject I not even am. That relationship is more healthy, the contract is clearer and more balanced.

Fastmail looks nice in terms of features/cost - it is also owned by the people who run it, which is a big green flag.

But I am in the same boat, looking for a new service, haven’t made a switch yet

but better than Brave

The commenter I replied to was specifically asking for chrome based.

Vivaldi!! - the company is also actively supporting the fediverse with hosting and aggressively promoting their large Mastodon server ,switch to Vivaldi!