Currently using IVPN, but considering switching and I want to see what this subreddit community thinks.
Wondering why you are considering leaving ivpn?
They appear to be 1 of only 2 trustworthy vpns now that mullvad left the building
airvpn being the other
What’s wrong with proton?
Been there, left that, they have no redeeming qualities.
what about Mullvad?
Co-founder donated to a fringe party supporting remigration
oh ok, right.
The issue is I don’t care about the founders political ideology (Unless he is some Sieg Hieling Nazi and not just some stupid alt-right millionaire)
if the political orientation of the cofounder is important (and I personally believe that it can be) than equally, if not more, important is the jurisdiction of the services. I’d avoid both UK and Switzerland for a VPN.
If I may ask, why avoid Switzerland? Is there some shady stuff they’ve been doing recently?
no, I just think the misconception that Switzerland is some kind of privacy paradise is very common and any possible malicious entity, from corporations to governments, can too easily take advantage of this.
Huh, that makes sense… Is that why Proton has been using it as a flex so much?
definitely, but to be fair the same goes for most similar swiss companies that I know.
Well, currently using mullvad because I paid cash and have months left.
However I tried ivpn with their one week option (two bucks!) At their basic plan.
I find speeds better on mullvad, but they’re otherwise comparable. I like both apps fine on android. If I was already on ivpn, I would not switch to mullvad for the minor speed uptick, since prices are comparable and switching multiple devices can be a very tiny annoyance.
In the past, I’ve used airvpn and proton for extended times (over six months). Proton is over priced, speeds were only marginally better than their free options, and iirc they were a pain about linux setup (I could be mixing them up with someone else though).
Airvpn worked great as a vpn. Port forwarding was an absolute cunt to get working for me. I suspect user error to be the biggest factor. Their android app sucks, and setting it up via other methods is preferred. But, at the time, they also lacked the built in ad/tracker blocking that I’ve enjoyed with mullvad and ivpn.
I did use nord briefly at one point. Worked fine, but at the time I was in need of port forwarding, and they had stopped offering that.
The only reason I’m maybe switching away from mullvad is the dubious political alignment of one of its owners. It really does work well for me, and is consistently faster than others I’ve tried, even with multi hop on. Even there, I’m not fully sure that the exact choice made by their part owner is exactly as bad as the common reaction is, so while I am likely switching away, I still can’t really state that it’s horrible to use the service.
The party he donated to has one big issue that’s a hell no for me, but it might not be there for everyone, and other aspects of the party slate are less objectionable, or even agreeable. In other words, I’m not mad at anyone that shrugs the donation off. It ain’t my business to judge people over such a narrow subject.
THAT being said, ivpn really is essentially the same service in terms of functionality. They even have servers that are in the same data centers. There’s several in the US in specific that are 100% in the same center once you go looking at the lists of exits. And I know there can’t be that many exact matches in cities across the world that aren’t from the same location. Since VPNs rent either virtual or hardware space in data centers to provide exits, if a given company doesn’t break from that, you won’t see a major difference between them.
I’m surprised that you had trouble port forwarding on airvpn. My understanding is mullvad doesn’t allow port forwarding, and Proton allows it but it’s extremely finicky and you have to constantly poll for it with some script (or maybe if you use their official client then you don’t need that, but I didn’t). Port forwarding was, why I went with airvpn.
Tbh, when I tried it, I was completely unfamiliar with port forwarding, so it was more of a me thing.
Nym VPN because it seemed like the best but I’m sure someone will tell me there’s something wrong with it 😂
I don’t. I would just be shifting trust from my ISP to some VPN provider for worse ping. I trust only I2P and Tor networks, so either it’s sensitive enough to go over darknet or I treat it as public.
Going to get buycott, they seem pretty good
I’m sure someone will tell me how they’re terrible though
proton, supports split tunneling, based in europe and they have a strict no-logs policy
So now proton is ok and Mullvad is bad? I thought proton was ostracized for the same reasons?
proton had one incident sponsoring a far-right influencer, which was probably caused by a rogue employee. they’ve also done some cringe praising of the republican party because they’re apparently against big tech abuses (lol)
that’s about it really. bad but not the worst thing in the world since they say that sponsorship was a mistake and it wont happen again. the political statements are cringe but it was just about free market blah blah so i personally don’t care since there isn’t really a better option
mullvad’s ceo on the other hand directly donated 5 million sek to örebropartiet, a fascist party in sweden. that’s very bad
Disclaimer: Don’t take my response; this post, or other replies seriously.
Everyone has their own feelings. The truth is we probably don’t code, understand, and can actually look at the technologies behind vpns. We are just users. That’s not a bad thing at all (but) here’s the truth.
Our opinions on privacy tools has changed. First proton was weird and mullvad good, now its mullvad is bad and proton is good. That’s not consistent and we just have to be honest because there’s many people with different beliefs and experiences privacy recommendations will never be consistent.
Let’s actually crack open both controversies. Protons was a company the other an individual. The result to the public the same now each company can’t be trusted. Vpns are a trust me bro industry and if you can’t trust them for whatever reason then just do not use those vpns.
The answer is simple hard to swallow and honestly straight forward. Stop using commercial VPN providers and start using proxies or tor. Vpns and their tunnels where originally developed for private server access not a general tool for app and internet browsing. They’re pretty good since the tunnel itself can be hidden or obscured. However the end result is a trust within a company.
So stop trusting people and opinions even mine.
my concern is about avoiding big tech collecting my data, so a vpn with a strict no-logs policy is good enough for me.
tor and proxies are just too much of a pain in the ass and not necessary for my use case, so i’m sticking with proton
Same here
AirVPN with privacy focus and port forwarding
There are literally dozens of us!!!
In all seriousness tho, I like the fact that Eddie supports amnezia wireguard.
Airvpn actually looks really good even though I’ve never heard of them. Cheap, has all the features I need and they have existed for a long time.
Heck yeah! I’ve been using them for about a year now. I’m happily going to pay for another year.
Mullvad but the founder is a fascist so ill change that after my time runs out
I’m not defending Mullvad, but this does lack more context.
How many times does it have to be ‘discussed’ though?
lemmy has a search function, 99% of people here already know what happened with mullvad.
Lemmy does have a search function, but is it good?
https://lemmy.zip/search?q=mullvad&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false
Threads 5 and 6 are the fairly obvious relevant ones when I searched
I’m not necessarily looking for a new discussion, I just thought it was important to clarify since it reads differently when you have more context.
I doubt those that are unaware would look much deeper into it.
it reads differently when you have more context
In what way?
As I mentioned in my other comment, there are two founders, one of which does not like the action of the other.
What context? Only thing I can think of it was a private donation rather than made by mullvad itself
It was the co-founder, Daniel, that made the donation, the other founder, Fredrik, “did not like that he made this donation”.
Edit: I’ll include a link to Mullvad’s official response to the controversy since it’s relevant.
Fair enough
Also context that the 5 million kronor (around €450,000) was roughly 72% of everything the party took in during 2025, and it’s also the largest private donation made to any Swedish political party that year.
Puts it into perspective.
First link I found as I’m lazy (but not lazy enough to not cite) other Lemmy comments/sites will agree.
Sure? He self-define anarchist
Looks like a social networks hate campaign to me.
Elon musk says hes an anarchist but he did a sieg heil in front of millions watching
Despots and the elite always like to brand themselves as democratic, for the people, or whatever. Its the usual propaganda. Can’t have the peasants seeing them for what they really are.
I switched from Mullvad to IVPN after the Mullvad troubles. IVPN seems good to so far, does everything I need and hasn’t been proven untrustworthy/politically dodgy yet.
Mullvad troubles
what troubles?
One of the founders bankrolled a far right party, allowing them to field candidates and they say that “Sweden is for the swedes” and want to forcibly deport anyone who is not. Kinda like that small mustache guy in the 40s in Germany.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
I need to bookmark my comment from a while back as an explainer lol
AirVPN. I switched from proton a while ago because it was a pain to do port forwarding. AirVPN lets me have multiple ports forwarding with ease. And they take xmr as payment!
What was a part of it was a pain, exactly? I use port forwarding and have no issues.
There wasn’t a clear/easy way to do it on a headless server. Maybe they’ve improved the service since
Don’t know how you do it but I just downloaded the config file from Proton and deploy stacks of the app I want to use port forwarding on + gluetun (which uses the conf file I mentioned). I don’t really see why a server being headless would complicate the process.
Proton, because its fast and reliable in my experience so i never felt the need to switch, plus i agree with their policies.
Mullvad for stuff that matters. Which is 24/7 on all devices.
Airvpn for piracy and only for piracy.
Ivpn, windscribe, proton or whoever else isn’t obviously an idf cutout and running a deal for scraping and bypassing geoblocks.
Ivpn: canary, audited, anonymous accounts purchasable with crypto or cash, no performance issues, no logs (allegedly), open source protocols and clients.
I really like their blatant honesty in “Do you really need a VPN?”
Fundamentally, the only use case of a VPN is if you trust them with your traffic more than your ISP. Since I’ve had multiple ISPs that serve up adds instead of 404s and will threaten you for using p2p protocols it’s easy to trust a VPN more. As best I can tell Ivpn is just a couple of security peeps running a VPN service cause they can–could they be corrupted or a honey pot? Yeah, but the anonymous accounts help mitigate that risk, and the reality is that even an anonymous account can be tied back to your IP. So don’t do anything illegal illegal on just a VPN and it’ll prolly be fine.
And they’re not advertised through everyone with a platform.
Considering what my ISP is I think I’d trust any vpn with a FOSS client over them…
Isn’t IVPN based in Gibraltar? 🤷♂️
It is. Which I suppose is a consideration, but being an autonomous territory they don’t have retention legislation yet. As the EU, and GB along with them (and to be honest, the rest of the developed world) tends toward mandating logs and shit that arithmetic may change. They aren’t a part of a surveillance sharing network today, and since I’m personally only using a VPN for p2p stuff this isn’t really a consideration for me personally.
I just today started using the new Tor VPN app. I have been using InviZible from F-Droid in SOCKS proxy mode for almost 2 years now, but not all apps support directing their network traffic through a SOX proxy. And so, some apps I was not able to do over Tor. I think the day will come where we as free people have to abandon the clear net entirely and do everything over Tor and I2P. The clearnet is going to become nothing except for ID upload verification screens.
Kinda surprised no one recommending Nym.
Yet an other swiss based facsist company with a touch of crypto bro. No thanks.
Source? Last I knew the founder is anti-fascist and regularly speaks out against things like tech oligarchy. Nothing of what I’ve heard him say or talk about has given me any feeling otherwise.
Crypto Bro -> https://cointelegraph.com/opinion/web3-has-a-metadata-problem , https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-mixnets-are-needed-to-make-bitcoin-private
Also they love using LLM trained on our works (devs) : https://nym.com/blog/bug-bounty-ai-age
About the fascism I understand that few people here (proportionally) seems to not be educated on the topic (I see to many pedolandians or canadians in here maybe) : fascism is not being a bad guys wanting to control everyone, lots of monarchs were that way, this is not fascism. Fascism is the bourgeoisie (the social class owning the properties, even more so the means of productions) taking power over society, the more power they grab the deeper you’re in fascism. That’s why many western people do not understand they live in fascist societies while they can agree that money is the real power, not the decrepit old white man put in front (thus they don’t understand fascism, and I think this is on purpose, from schools to media).
So a senior research scientist at MIT (CEO) and a founder of Swiss crypto brokerage and financial services firm (COO) decided to create a company in… wait for it… Switzerland! Famous country know for it fight against the aggression of the bourgeoisie for the last century and its strong stance against today’s genocides. Definitely not known for being the Nazi’s gold vault and all sorts of awful money laundering. If you understand that fascism come from the people who owns the money what do you think about private banks? Swiss is fascists’ paradise and it always have been.
I can close my eyes on Swedish people establishing in Sweden, or anyone in his European country, even if the actual government is far-right there or not. But this is not really the case here, it’s more like the Y-combinator guys establishing in Delaware or… Cayman Islands! This is 101 people only seeking money at the expense of everyone else. Hence my point of view this is already quiet deep in fascism, even if there are smart enough not to open their mouth about Palestine and keeping themselves into crypto-broing and “privacy” (I could totally see them loving anarcho-capitalism).
Also bonus : what social media do they choose? OH NO! Linkedin and Twitter, I wouldn’t have guessed. If you want maximum cringe check the avatar -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-roussel-01993143/
Fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism this is Roger Griffin’s influential minimalist definition of fascism, and it’s probably the most succinct formulation available in the comparative fascism literature.
“Fascism is bourgeoisie taking power” is very reductive as a definition, and it doesn’t hold up to scholarly work on the issue.
Never actually used them, but this is my note about them in my vpn spreadsheet
‘Pricey if doing per month, not if doing for year. Lack of transparency, shit website. Dodgy feel.’
You can add “mixnet often not the right choice and available for free through tor if needed.”
Even compared to companies owned by former idf cybersec unit members nym feels the most like a honeypot. Historically speaking that means it’s probably a bunch of true believers being manipulated by a handler working fifteen minutes a day on them.
