Enshitified product exists - > good alternative arises to meet demand - > good alternative becomes popular - > good alternative either becomes enshitified to maximize profits or is purchased by owner of original enshitified product.

The capitalist way.

They took out the clause in their policy about not selling user data.

It's pretty obvious what follows that

So why does a free and ethical software need a user data collection policy that we have to agree to?

Why do they suddenly need to start collecting our data?

Librewolf seems exactly the same, but it breaks Lemmy for me. It's probably a setting I didn't know to turn off.

Don't hold out on us! Which browsers?

There are several Firefox forks. Waterfox (based in Europe UK), Librewolf, Zen etc.

Self-hosting and FOSS are the way to go. We saw this demonstrated when Raspberry Pi started acting stupidly as a company. There are so many alternatives that it is easy to switch. Unfortunately some things are pretty tough to self-host, like email and anonymizing VPN. But there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that makes it less painful to divest from bad companies.

I've been eyeing FastMail.

Self hosting is almost impossible with email these days. Places like Gmail and Outlook are going to consider you automatically suspicious until you've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you have a lot of legit email going through. The only way to do that is to attach the domain to a service that's already proven.

This isn't even getting into the configuration issues of running an email server without it becoming a spam relay as soon as it's turned on.

It's a generally recognised principle in economics that we want competition to take place, and for consumers to have a choice - for a plethora of reasons too large to list here. The most important IMO is a political one though: we don't want monopolies for the same reason we don't want monarchies and dictatorships. Being the sole provider of any very important product puts an obscene amount of power in the hand of a single corporation (or a handful of them). We never want that much power to be so concentrated in so few individuals, because it's fundamentally injust, and always leads to catastrophe. Also consider that if that power is a corporation or a "private" individual, they're not accountable to anyone but their shareholders (who, in turn never want the corp to be anything other than a money making machine). Even a dictator is more accountable to his subjects than a multinational corporation is to anyone. So there you have it, that's why we need alternatives.

PLENTY of reasons if they oppose enshitification... but if they embrace it, then yes, they'll just be another pimple in the ass of enshitificated software

proton disclosed the identity of climate activists without even being forced to

Also their announcement to stop posting on Mastodon and this blogpost

ProtonMail removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy

I've started migrating from Proton to Mailbox.org. Mailbox supports IMAP, and they have a calendar as well. https://mailbox.org/en/

The proton CEO praised Donald Trump's choice for who would lead the government's antitrust division, and now most of Lemmy think they're a Nazi company or something.

Just typical cancel culture bullshit. Where people choose to be outraged rather than attempting to understand a situation.