aptea on Nostr: I'm going on two months of using Proton's Lumo as my primary AI and honestly, I'm not ...
I'm going on two months of using Proton's Lumo as my primary AI and honestly, I'm not looking back.
Before this, Perplexity was my main AI because I found its answers to be particularly helpful on technical subjects. It sources things very well and tends to have the best overall answers with technical topics. However, it's a Big Tech AI service: it's inherently horrible for privacy. While my Perplexity account is pseudonymous (email alias, no connections to me, personally) and I only ever use it for things like tech troubleshooting and research, it's still not good for privacy.
Before I decided to give Lumo a proper try, I had been using Venice AI. It's a privacy-respecting AI service with end-to-end encryption options and uncensored model options. At its core, it's a very solid service itself, but the main problem with it is that it has severe restrictions on free users: only ten text queries allowed per day. That's an absurdly low cap. Worse still, their lowest plan is $18/month. I use AI a fair amount but not enough to justify an $18/month subscription plan.
When Lumo was first launched, I found it to be pretty useless. It hallucinated constantly, the UI/UX was barebones, it just wasn't a great experience. However, when Lumo 2.0 dropped, things changed. Now, it feels nearly on par with Perplexity in terms of information and sourcing, and the UI/UX is actually excellent now. I find it to be very rare that I ever have to use a different AI, even with their free plan restrictions, and I'm even to the point where I'm considering subscribing precisely because I don't feel like I'm exploited as a free user. Their subscription is ~$10/month, by the way: significantly cheaper than just about every other AI option out there, as even the cheapest alternatives are still heavily restricted.
The fact that an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-respecting option is now truly competitive is amazing news because I love the benefits of AI, I'm just not keen on the ways it can be used against us.
#ai #proton #protonlumo #perplexity #encryption
Published at
2026-08-31 04:12:05 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "I'm going on two months of using Proton's Lumo as my primary AI and honestly, I'm not looking back. \n\nBefore this, Perplexity was my main AI because I found its answers to be particularly helpful on technical subjects. It sources things very well and tends to have the best overall answers with technical topics. However, it's a Big Tech AI service: it's inherently horrible for privacy. While my Perplexity account is pseudonymous (email alias, no connections to me, personally) and I only ever use it for things like tech troubleshooting and research, it's still not good for privacy.\n\nBefore I decided to give Lumo a proper try, I had been using Venice AI. It's a privacy-respecting AI service with end-to-end encryption options and uncensored model options. At its core, it's a very solid service itself, but the main problem with it is that it has severe restrictions on free users: only ten text queries allowed per day. That's an absurdly low cap. Worse still, their lowest plan is $18/month. I use AI a fair amount but not enough to justify an $18/month subscription plan.\n\nWhen Lumo was first launched, I found it to be pretty useless. It hallucinated constantly, the UI/UX was barebones, it just wasn't a great experience. However, when Lumo 2.0 dropped, things changed. Now, it feels nearly on par with Perplexity in terms of information and sourcing, and the UI/UX is actually excellent now. I find it to be very rare that I ever have to use a different AI, even with their free plan restrictions, and I'm even to the point where I'm considering subscribing precisely because I don't feel like I'm exploited as a free user. Their subscription is ~$10/month, by the way: significantly cheaper than just about every other AI option out there, as even the cheapest alternatives are still heavily restricted.\n\nThe fact that an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-respecting option is now truly competitive is amazing news because I love the benefits of AI, I'm just not keen on the ways it can be used against us.\n\n#ai #proton #protonlumo #perplexity #encryption",
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