I asked some friends who know a lot about this situation about this and apparently this is fake news.
Direct quote of what they send me:
He didn’t try to take over anything. The team behind PrivacyTools.io could not get in contact anymore with the domain owner and they haven’t seen him for a long time and had some conflicts with him before that too. So the team decided to move on to a new name, they got the domain PrivacyGuides.org and were migrating everything for weeks. Then, in the end, when everything was already migrated and redirected, the PrivacyTools.io owner came back a while later and was extremely angry that the team had moved away from his infrastructure.
Jonah is hosting the new servers and had already been hosting stuff for PTIO before. The PTIO guy is still incredibly salty and made a new website with a long article about how Jonah is plotting to take over everything.
This new website also contains many bad recommendations that are sponsored and he now makes money from. I would consider PTIO very untrustworthy at this point. The entire original team behind it moved on as well…
I’m not saying you’re wrong - I don’t know the truth. But your source is literally: “Trust me, bro.”
They gave independently verifiable information that you can check for yourself:
- privacytools.io gives bad advice vs privacyguides.org
- privacytools.io uses sponsored products
- the team moved to privacyguides.org
Those should all be something you could check for yourself. If you’re already interested in privacy tools, you should be able to verify as least some of that yourself.
That’s fair to say. My source is someone who was indirectly involved with some of it, and an admin/moderator I trust of another privacy/security group. And like @[email protected] said, some of these things you can verify for yourself.
In cases like this it’s often hard to find the truth, and there’s always an amount of he said, she said; all I can say is that I personally trust these people, fwiw.
The neat part about this is who gives a fuck. Pick an instance. Go subscribe to some communities. Unpopular not to support the latest witchhunt/bullshittery, I know. Most folks moved past this last year. PG is still up to date and relevant, and PTIO isn’t. I could see how that would make some salty.
Good thing I decided to move to lemmy.world. Seems shady.
And he apparently removed this post when posted on lemmy.one a week ago.
A lot of this article seems to be complaining about not being involved in literally everything. Imo I’m not surprised the team moved on without him
I can’t speak for the money situation, aside from that being extremely shady if it’s true, but then again if the team moved and continued using the money for the arranged purpose then I’m not too sure if that stands.
Comparing the projects after the change of direction, the new website looks a lot more trustworthy than the old one. The old one is worded a bit like a brochure… the 50% off is nice but rubbing me the wrong way for the homepage of a privacy website. The memes and posters aren’t for me either personally.
Looking at this from a balanced perspective is difficult for me, the structure of the article gives me the sense that there was a big misunderstanding or communication breakdown somewhere.
I’d invite everyone to look at the community responses for all the material quoted in the article (YT comments, reddit etc) and come to your own conclusions. I’ll be staying on lemmy.one for now, but you could decide to hop to another instance!
Interesting
There was another post about them abandoning all their Mastodon instances for a while (like over a month) until a bunch of people complained but I’m not sure how to find it. I think this article is from before that happened.
