Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason.

The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.

But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.

> the search in Proton Mail is so bad

Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.

I use it, the search is very bad.

Proton is ok to meh - great marketing though. Try Infomaniak instead.

If Proton is too expensive, you can use zoho. I switched from Google and I'm missing nothing.

Proton’s $4 a month is where I ended up landing a few years ago and it’s cheaper with the 2-year lock in they give every now and then. Sharing just in case it’s buried under unlimited. Although our usage may vary in case there are things in unlimited you need.

I don't think a $10 budget will suffice.

It’s far from impossible, you just have to prioritize your privacy at more than a few bucks a month.

It sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.

> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?

> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...

so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.

assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.

Try reading more books, eg autobiographies or fiction. Understanding other people’s perspectives is a skill like any other.

They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

That's a big deal to some of us.

Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.

And platform B is basically a worse version of everything than platform A.

I admire the motivation though

You probably know but Substacks’ free speech thing is a huge turn off.

That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...

https://ghost.org — Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore.

Substack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most

Keila: https://www.keila.io/

Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.

From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.

Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.

https://www.beehiiv.com/ is another one.

boosty.to is a Substack alternative, outside of both the US and the EU.