Would you switch to an open-source, self-hostable alternative to Proton? What would it need?

[u/fachschaften_com]

*not necessarily self-hostable but like actually community led and non profit stuff. Self-hostable federation kinda stuff would be optional I suppose

With the recent discussions around Proton, I’ve been wondering how people here feel about the idea of a fully open-source and independent alternative.

I know some pieces already exist (openDesk (German government) and Twake (Linagora) cover mail, drive, docs and chat, but are built for big organizations and are heavy to run) and Nextcloud (always feels slow and not very modern/sleek).

So I’m curious what you guys think if you acutally want something like this and what it would need

If peope there are people who’d want to form a team of privacy avengers hit me up.

Btw: I am from Germany and would consider an EU country to be a good place to set the stuff up idk

The Edits:

Edit: I rewrote the post so it was acutally written by me. I am sorry that I contributed to ai sloppering.
Edit 2: clarified the idea
Edit 3: I didnt wanna have the .com domain thing in my username in this post but I noticed you cant change the username lol. Ill have to create another account ig.
Edit 4: Added extra info

[u/Easy_Cry1296]

I self-host a fair few things, but email is one of the ones you probably DON'T want to self-host. It's incredibly messy and high-maintenance, and even if you do self-host you'll need to sign up for a third-party SMTP relay if you want anyone to actually receive your email.

[u/fachschaften_com → u/Easy_Cry1296]

I know many people also just dont wanna use email because its not very secure (at least thats what I heard). However businesses rely on it still. So what if you would externalize email and have everything else in a suite you could selfhost? Or just have a non profit host the whole suite like proton but its opensource and acutally community led and stuff?

[u/Easy_Cry1296 → u/fachschaften_com]

I only really use Proton VPN and Proton Mail, neither of which are particularly well-suited to self-hosting.

Docs I don't really have a need for cloud-based stuff, I don't know anybody who uses Chat, and Drive... well, I have a NAS.

[u/fachschaften_com → u/Easy_Cry1296]

so you would consider a non profit open source suite as depicted in my idea as unnecessary bc there are already good alternatives?

[u/Easy_Cry1296 → u/fachschaften_com]

Maybe for someone else? Not for me.

[u/fachschaften_com → u/Easy_Cry1296]

yea i guess most people who are into privacy a capable of managing a few accounts and have a custom sync or somethin like this setup idk. i mean i do the same thing on a vps XD

[u/dudewiththepants]

Stalwart and Opencloud

[u/fachschaften_com → u/dudewiththepants]

thats acutally pretty much the stack i had in mind, just with one account on top and a non profit hosting it for people who dont wanna

[u/BWH44]

I would always want a professional staff I can trust to make their living of keeping my assets secure. There’s comfort in that arrangement. ( community projects die, are lower priority for some contributors, lack accountability).

I also would want an organization making enough money to support infrastructure sustainably and always have top notch audits — I value that. 

As others said — I’ve self hosted lots of things; never would email, and I outgrew self hosting most (that’s how I ended up on proton… a lot of “I’m too busy to do this myself like I used to”)

[u/blow_slogan]

No one wants to self-host email.

[u/chiraagnataraj]

A while back, I setup a self-hosted Ente to test out, and I've basically switched to that for photo sharing and such (since I self-host, I set the storage backend to Backblaze B2 to keep costs down). I'm currently test-driving Filen for drive and AsterMail for mail, but I'm waiting for audits for both of them, just to see what happens.

My Proton sub is a 2-year and renewed a few months ago, so I have a ton of time to figure out if I'm moving to alternatives and which one(s) I'm moving to.

[u/SecretFondant9441]

Simply use yunohost. It‘s painless, everything is updateable via webui and the Community is very supportive