I used Mullvad for a long time, but hearing about one of the two CEOs actively supporting and financing swedish Nazis, I’m looking to put my money elsewhere. That’s the second one after Private Internet Access (who supported Gab).
I had AirVPN and Surfshark being recomnended, how do people here feel? What do you use?
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I think people say that AirVPN is pretty goated
Yeah, that’s what I use. Switched from Mullvad after they dropped port forwarding.
there was an article today about the entire mullvad company being blindsided by this and a lot of people being upset. with any luck the guy will leave or get thrown out.
also i think they’re technically nazbols.
Isn’t he the founder?
Cofounder, and 50% owner. For him to get kicked out would take a lot.
he could be a rational human about it and see that it’s bad for the brand. considering he was willing to work with a guy that actively dislikes what he did he may have a few braincells left.
That kinda seems unlikely to me. I’m certain that he’s aware that supporting ethnic cleansing (albeit not overtly violent) is not compatible with having customers.
they don’t tend to see it like that from my experience. but yeah the chance is slim.
I think “would take a lot” might be understating it.
It’s likely he’d have to be bought out by the other guy with an attractive offer.
co-. the other founder is pretty pissed.
This is the only reason for why I haven’t demanded a refund of my remaining balance yet. I’m holding out for a dismissal or something.
Is there other option?
There are many options. It’s important to do some research on these options. It’s also important to know why you want to choose a certain provider. Check their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the very least. For now, I’m looking into IVPN.
Demanding a refund could add to the pressure though, you could always renew after he (hopefully) goes. I can’t get a refund since mine has just run out but I’m not making any long-term decisions until the dust has settled.
I totally agree! It’s just that I have two routers setup with them, running 24/7, and I have configured mom’s devices with my account and I don’t have the time to reconfigure all this with something else at the moment. 😩
also i think they’re technically nazbols.
what’s a nazbol?
A Nazi, basically.
It stands for “national bolshevism,” so tankies minus the leftism, which… yeah.
National Bolsheviks, in essence merging nazism with communism.
Like this?
Yes! Alternatively you can just put an Z there too, same meaning.
have they released an official statement about it?
not that i can find.
This is likely true, but in the hacker news thread about this, the non Nazi cofounder was pretty defensive about what a great guy he was, and that there was just no way that him being a Nazi could ever effect Mullvad itself:
Here’s one example, but these linked thread has more excuses hes made:
kfreds 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–]
I’m sorry to hear that. For what it’s worth I think there’s nuance in his decision that most people don’t see. Of course that doesn’t mean I think it was the right decision to make.
Here’s something worth considering: why would someone whose ideal is open borders, who has been an animal rights activist, and someone who has led Mullvad for 17 years (with the track record it has), choose to donate to this party? If you like what Daniel and I have done together over the past 17 years, and now vehemently oppose his choice to make this donation, doesn’t that make you just a little bit curious?
It made me curious. It didn’t change my ultimate stance, but it did temper my emotions about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kfreds
That level of denial feels custom made for them to give him a pass and keep him onboard.
when you’ve known someone personally for that long you’re bound to get defensive, i think. and the question is worth considering; why?
AirVpn is awesome
Curious about the software? at least on linux, the gui is very, very dated and it doesn’t even have split tunnelling I would rather stick to a gui app. I haven’t looked at their android app yet.
They offer standard wireguard and openvpn configs. There is no need for a “Airvpn client” gui.
I prefer a gui, and have little faith in a company that is unwilling, or incapable of providing a decent one. Mullvad has a very good gui on linux, and android, as well as a browser extension. Airvpn has a linux app that looks 20 years old and doesn’t even have split tunnelling, apparently their android app also doesn’t have split tunnelling, so wtf are they actually doing, and where is their roadmap?
I’ve been using airvpn for almost 10 years now, no complaints.
List of vpns not to use
NordVPN
Facebook Onavo
ExpressVPN
Private Internet Access
Everything Kape Technologies
HolaVPN
PureVPN
ZenMate
CyberGhost
Imagine someone unironically using Facebook’s VPN service.
I don’t want to be mean to you, as it might be just ignorance.
But my dude, why did you decide to use Inaccessible photo instead of using text or at the very least Text +photo?
If I suffer from any condition that affect my vision or my reading /understanding… how am I supposed to read this?
sorry, added the list in plaintext
Thank you a lot🌹.
Why is airvpn on your list?
What’s wrong with Nord?
NordVPN is interesting because it was less about them handing over data to the government, and them just not being transparent about an attack. All the others in that post clearly were in cahoots with big gov.
NordVPN’s defense was technically coherent: because the company doesn’t store activity logs, no user browsing data was exposed. The breach was framed as a vendor problem. The attacker had gotten in through an insecure remote management system that the data center had left open. NordVPN said it hadn’t even known the system existed.
That may all be accurate. But the eighteen months of silence is the actual story.
I’ve just signed up to ivpn for a month. I appreciate their honesty on their website and the education they also have.
My only challenge is looking at getting through the great firewall… I’m yet to find any successful VPN’s / best practices
I’ve been a Mullvad user for probably about a year but I’m considering Nym.
Editing for further context: their board includes Chelsea Manning which bodes well, I like that they use decentralized nodes, and that all of their code is open for review. The $NYM stuff is a little weird, but to me it comes off like an attempt to decentralize currency, which can anonymize in its own way (with an asterisk). Just not sure what that landscape looks like, since a person’s identity can often be figured out by looking at the public ledger. I’m still learning about Nym though.
Interesting, I have never heard of them. Honestly my first glance is I don’t like their website. It looks way too investor/shill heavy which worries me about the longevity/future of the platform.
I like the concept of a decentralized system if they can promise reliability and privacy across all nodes I am concerned about how privacy will be retained when a node is established in an external country that has more restrictive government controls.
I heavy dislike the fact it auto renews. That right there is a huge red flag for me because that means whatever payment information I provided, is being stored in a way that it can be linked directly to my account. With Mullvad once the 30 day window is up, they toss the payment token so it’s no longer associated/linked with the account, instead relying on you to have to provide a piece of info that they can connect to the account if you have account issues. While they can say that they don’t link accounts to activity, I heavily dislike the potential that it could be done in the future, especially since they are very upfront about it being blockchain so that tells me the information is permanent/never removed.
What’s the story with them charging much less if you pay with their crypto currency?
Not entirely sure. I think it’s to gain adoption and it helps subsidize node operators.
I use Proton but I’m also in their ecosystem (ie, I also pay for ProtonMail and get the rest of their suite alongside it)
Wasn’t Proton’s CEO in some hot water a year or so ago, or was that a bunch of hooey? I know it’s impossible to find an ethical CEO, but just curious.
…sure I could look it up, but my phone battery sucks and it helps boost activity.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
I use Proton. but I find it suss how they are trying to do it all, so I don’t use most of their products
He made a couple of supportive tweets about a Trump anti-trust appointment (who was later fired by Trump) and the Republican Party that offended some people, mainly the American left. People seem to forget that he is not American, nor is Proton an American company, so none of this actually means anything. He cannot vote, he and his company do not fund the American right in any way and he is not someone with a huge online presence, so it’s unlikely he has much influence.
More recently a far right influencer in France signed up for Proton’s affiliate program and promoted Proton on his channel, which led to some misleading claims about Proton “funding Nazis”. Proton immediately removed him from the affiliate program upon being notified of this and apologised for what it claims was an oversight.
Personally I’m very sick of the purity tests and cancel culture on the left and wish people would slow down a bit and really consider whether these “controversies” are actually worth burning it all down for. Proton provides mainstream, easy to use alternatives to big tech and is better existing than not. Its VPN is also one of the few that retains port forwarding, which can be useful for piracy. After the attempts to cancel Proton, the left hard shilled for Mullvad and now it turns out that’s objectively worse in terms of its political influencing. Mullvad is another company that does more good in the world than bad, are we going to cancel it too?
“Why do Americans care if Ford supports Hitler, he’s not even German!”
Interesting combination of lies and unironic use of “cancel culture” in the rest of the nonsense btw.
You guys don’t even bother pretending to be sane these days. It’s just mask off from the first reply with the Hitler comparisons that used to be considered a joke in more normal times.
This dumbass is literally looking at CEOs outright supporting fascism and ethnic cleansing in a privacy sub and asking why people are bringing up the Nazis.
Btw, dumbfuck, Godwin had an interview where he tried to point out to people like you that the “Law” isn’t meant to stop people from accurately describing loud and proud fascists.
in a privacy sub
???
You don’t need to belabor your complete lack of understanding, believe me, I’m aware.
They made a very naive comment suggesting a authoritarian regime supports privacy
And doubled down then changed their comments as if the way back machine doesn’t exist in order to backtrack without having to admit they were wrong.
It’s like picking an airline. No matter who you choose somebody has a story of how they’re varying degrees of awful.
I’m on Proton. I disliked when that one guy made that social post comment about how Republicans are easier to deal with. I’m not offended enough to roll the dice with another provider only to later discover they’re literal nazis, their founder has Epstein connections or they discriminate against trans people.
(Which is to say, if you want to switch from Mullvad I get it.)
I use IVPN
Commenting so I remember to check this thread later. My Mullvad expires in 5 days.
Can always count on Lemmy to raise awareness on where to not spend money!
Switched! I don’t have the time/willpower to heavily research this, and changing VPNs is easy compared to changing things like eMail or OS.
Especially easy with all these recommendations here.
Sharing this because I think it’s funny, but someone opened an issue on Mullvad’s github about the questionable donations of one of the cofounders: https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/10685
Yep, I’ve been using AirVPN for about 6 months now. No complaints, works great! (Yes they support port forwarding.)
And works with gluetun! https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/airvpn.md
I’ll definitely be renewing when my year is up.
Been using it myself for some years but the up speeds are really ass max I got was 5MB/s up. In speed tests ~300mbit up while my server was in an actual Datacenter with multi gibt connection I switched to proton and got throttled at 1gbit which is a lot better
Oh and someone was hosting a Tor endpoint on one of there vpns which gets the IP Blacklisted and you potentially banned from some trackers. support just closed my complaint without comment.
I am not a mullvad user, but I recently found https://njal.la/. Curious if anyone has used it before and their experience
I use them on my nas for torrenting.
- €5 per month.
- Accepts payment in crypto, including monero.
- Can only use your account on one device.
- Only one location, Sweden.
- Assigns dynamic IP address to indivdual user session and each IP address is only assigned to one user at a time.
- Any port(s) can be opened.
Most might consider it expensive give the limitation on devices and location but the freedom to open multiple ports makes it amazing for torrenting.
My nas runs 5 instances of qbittorrent and slskd all with connectable ports opened.It works reliably for what I use it for. Other than that, I have nothing to report on my experience using them and in this case, no news is good news.
I’m genuinely curious, what does running 5 instances of qbittorrent do that 1 instance doesn’t?
That’s a valid question and I have 5 different answers. Lol. It all built out over the last 5 years.
I started with one instance and was raw-dogging the net but only using reputable private trackers (ie, teh cabal).
On GGn I was seeding about 20,000 torrents (bulk of this was Linux isos for older retro computers).
Every time ggn has stability issues (every fucking day), it would drag my entire torrent client down with it so I moved all my ggn torrents to their own instance to isolate that problem. That instance still struggled to handle so many torrents on such an unstable tracker so I split ggn across 2 instances.Then I found some things on public trackers I wanted to download and seed, the full dump of Redtopia being one example. So I created another instance that was routed through a VPN via gluetun to use on public trackers.
And lastly I created one more instance to handle my porn stash.
So that’s how I amassed 5 separate torrent clients on the same machine and more recently I moved to a different ISP who uses CGNAT and have decided that I am happy with cgnat and use a VPN that allows opening of ports to handle all my torrent clients.
Damn. I couldn’t fathom a possible reason. It’s obvious reading this it was because I wasn’t thinking even close to your scale. Thanks for the reply!
Being in the proton ecosystem I use their VPN, and it’s been working great thus far.
Weird to say Proton is the lesser of the two evils, but not by much.
Mullvad donated to a actual right-wing fascist party.
Proton’s owner complimented the US government and gave away customer data.
This article breaks down the Proton controversies. I believe this comment overly abstracts them, but read what actually happened yourself: http://thoughtportal.org/2025/02/26/proton-mail-says-its-politically-neutral-while-praising-republican-party/