My name is Victor and I am a privacy and FOSS advocate.
On this website you will find my personal blog where I write about anything I feel like writing about. You can expect to find my thoughts on topics related to computing and the Internet as well my various hobbies. I plan on creating self hosting tutorials as well as sharing useful information I’ve gleaned while working with technology.
For a few months now, I have been free of the odious communication system known as Discord. In this post I’ll explain exactly why it sucks and I will no longer be using it… With some caveats.
At the time of this writing you’ve undoubtedly heard of Discord’s decision to enact age verification through some rather invasive means. That’s been explained and discussed ad nauseum by now so I won’t talk about it here. Instead, I’ll give a few reasons why it was terrible even before this all happened.
In my last post I wrote about needing to change some of the services I use from Proton in order to achieve a higher plane of leetness. Since leaving Protonmail for mailbox.org, I’ve enabled the use of neomutt (which was possible but a pain to set up with the Proton Bridge) which, so far, has been very good.
But what has really opened the gate to me using neomutt is mutt-wizard: a tool by Luke Smith. Neomutt is notoriously a pain to set up even without needing to deal with Proton Bridge, but with mutt-wizard it takes one command and a few seconds to set up, literally. It depends on a small collection of tools such as neomutt (obviously), curl, isync, msmtp, and pass. There are a few more recommended tools to use with neomutt after setup, but you can read more about those on the mutt-wizard site and in the mutt-wizard man pages, which are incredibly detailed and will answer anything you need to know about the tool.
For the past few years I’ve been using Protonmail as my email provider as well as ProtonVPN. I ended up subscribing to the Unlimited plan for a deal on their cloud storage, which eventually expanded to a password manager which ended up replacing Bitwarden for me.
For the most part I’ve been satisfied with Proton services with the exception of two main gripes:
VPN app on Android disconnects randomly, forcing you to manually reconnect in the app. This has been happening for probably over a year. Very annoying because I use it 24/7 with the killswitch enabled.
The Proton Bridge, a program required to use a local client, is extremely annoying to deal with when using anything other than Thunderbird. I consider email to be an inherently insecure form of communication to begin with, so I’d rather have IMAP support than the local encryption provided by the bridge. I can’t be leet unless I use neomutt, dammit!
I’ve dealt with these relatively minor issues because of the convenience of having all these services under one account and “Portal”, but lately I’ve begun to see having all of my eggs in one basket like this as more of an anti-feature than a benefit. Not to mention the feature creep of the service which now includes an AI chatbot, crypto wallet, and probably some other nonsense by now while the existing products sit with unresolved bugs. I want to get a new email provider at the least, but now I might not qualify for the same subscription price without it so now I have to find another provider for this and this…
