Basically, it's saying, use Nextcloud, don't get fooled by these privacy-oriented sites that may have some sort of open source client to access the service, but is running on pure closed-source infrastructure. I would agree that it's smarter to use Nextcloud instead, but for email? Yeah, I'm not self-hosting that.
I definitely agree on that open source backend is great, but you still cannot verify that that's the code running on their servers.
Open source frontend is much more important IMO.
you still cannot verify that that’s the code running on their servers
This is why end-to-end encryption is paramount. You could be using Gmail as your provider for all I care as long as your messages are GPG-encrypted. Even if you trust the server-side completely (e.g. self-hosted), it's still better to encrypt wherever possible, since it reduces attack surface.
Someone explain this meme for me
Basically, it's saying, use Nextcloud, don't get fooled by these privacy-oriented sites that may have some sort of open source client to access the service, but is running on pure closed-source infrastructure. I would agree that it's smarter to use Nextcloud instead, but for email? Yeah, I'm not self-hosting that.
I definitely agree on that open source backend is great, but you still cannot verify that that's the code running on their servers. Open source frontend is much more important IMO.
This is why end-to-end encryption is paramount. You could be using Gmail as your provider for all I care as long as your messages are GPG-encrypted. Even if you trust the server-side completely (e.g. self-hosted), it's still better to encrypt wherever possible, since it reduces attack surface.
Very informative I did not know proton mail had a closed source backend
My life changed ever since I started self hosting a Nextcloud server