I've used proton for a year or two now and it is fine. Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi and it sort of kind of works with gluetun (the rotating port is annoying but it still is a forwarded port).

But I've increasingly been annoyed with Proton as a company and am looking to migrate my email/domain to fastmail in the very near future. I COULD continue to just pay for the vpn (60 USD a year is pretty reasonable) but also feel like this is a good opportunity to "shop around"

Checked the wiki and other FAQs (which all basically crib from said wiki) and they all basically boil down to proton or mullivad... except that mullivad apparently stopped allowing port forwarding which is a bit of an issue for any torrents and the like.

So are there any other good options?

Thanks

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[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 112 points 1 week ago (5 children)

mullvad

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[–] matey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 53 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

What's going on with Proton the company?

Edit: ah fuck, thanks for the replies. Sigh.

[–] AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com 84 points 1 week ago (21 children)

Their CEO praised Trump/the Republican Party. He got widely criticised for it. Proton released a damage control statement but later deleted it after it made things worse.

People are now moving away from Proton as a result.

[–] Extras5023@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wow! Add me to that group. I need to cancel my annual family plan.

[–] Gronk@aussie.zone 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I unfortunately bought a subscription before dickhead made his statement. Looks like I'm with them for a year >.<

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[–] Wildfire0Straggler3@lemm.ee 46 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The CEO said that Trump chose a great pick and sided with Republicans and there was a firestorm over it, he doubled down on his position through the official Proton channel.

https://archive.ph/2yWGz

[–] FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe 21 points 1 week ago

Ffs I literally just got proton. Fuuuuuck that

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[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an "I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW" state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won't do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to "cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want"). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago

I wouldn't exactly call Tim Berners-Lee a "libertarian tech bro".

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 9 points 1 week ago

"libertarian"

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (27 children)

Just FYI, the majority of Proton AG (which includes all Proton services) is owned by a non-profit body called the "Proton Foundation". This are headed by a board of 5 members, including Andy (CEO) and Tim Berners-Lee (the literal father of the internet as we know it).

Proton is fine.

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[–] limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Proton recently closed their masterdon account because of the mutual hostility

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[–] DARbarian@fedia.io 44 points 1 week ago (2 children)

AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad, Windscribe

[–] kbal@fedia.io 37 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

[–] AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

What exactly does port forwarding do and why is it better for torrenting like I've heard? I've been using Mullvad for a couple of years now but if I could get faster torrent download speeds that would be great

[–] kbal@fedia.io 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you'd get more peers (which doesn't matter if you're just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

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[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

Mullvad, IVPN and ~~Nym~~ (not tested with audits yet, do not trust as much as the other two).

For clearnet browsing. PIA, AirVPN and Windscribe for torrenting. Windscribe and PIA are probably good for either but this is my classification, take it as you will

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I agree on this with the exception of PIA.

Marketing is BS like most VPN
Company is based in the USA
They do analytics
You cannot register "anonymously"

It's not the worst VPN you could choose but there is better options.

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[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

PIA user here. It gets the job done

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[–] droolio@feddit.uk 29 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Still using Private Internet Access (PIA).

Honestly, dunno why they've fallen out of fashion due to the FUD about being owned by an unsavoury parent company, but the most important matter to me is if they keep logs, which they don't. One of the few VPN companies tested on this, in court, and in a recent audit. Plus still extremely cheap (if you go for 3yr+3mo).

Port forwarding works with with this docker NAS stack. Doesn't use gluetun, but there's a specialised docker-wireguard-pia container as part of the stack, with a script that handles port changes. Been flawless.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago

Yeah they are throroughly vetted and work well, competitively priced. I've never seen a reason to switch.

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[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 week ago

Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.

https://i2pd.website/

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ

Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.

Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday's its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you're good to go, and i2p is also quite slow...

... but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you've set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses 'garlic' routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet... so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.

I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.

[–] land@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you mainly do torrenting, AirVPN is a good option. I have recently moved away from ProtonVPN; it’s too expensive.

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[–] zedgeist@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Just throwing in another voice for PIA. Their corporate owners may be questionable, but I've been with them since before they sold out and have never heard a peep from my ISP for seeding terabytes of torrents. They don't keep logs, and they are audited to prove it regularly.

EDIT: They also have port forwarding, but not for every exit server.

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[–] upstroke4448@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'd say the proven good ones are Proton, Mullvad, and IVPN.

Windscribe has really improved a lot and is worth considering. Still probably worth waiting for Freshscribe infrastructure before considering over the 3 I mentioned above.

Nym and Obscura are up and comers worth looking at. Nym is a decentralized VPN and Obscura has partnered with Mullvad to offer a true double hop (ie one in where both hops are not owned by the same entity).

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[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 week ago (11 children)

If you want port forwarding the choice is between AirVPN, ProtonVPN and Njalla. Iirc PIA also supports port forwarding, but their ownerships reputation is no good.

Mullvad, IVPN and many other services don't support port forwarding.

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