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.

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

Allows other competitors to exist

Chrome/edge are the same (yes, I know edge is technically better)

If everything only needs to adhere to chromium then chromium can put propriety code that only they are privy to and when web standards are made around it all competition can’t exist

We already have webapps that say they only work on chrome

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.

Depends what you want. If you want an experience like Proton with its own app then use Tuta. If you're happy with IMAP with a client like Evolution (Linux) or FairEmail (mobile for Android) or access via a website then mailbox.org are very good.

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

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.

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.

Ah the chaos theory reasoning. There can't be anything perfect when thinking about it as a whole but you can find sections in a diversified area that are mostly perfect at some point in time but nothing ever lasts.

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?

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

It's pretty obvious what follows that