First off, sorry if this has been asked a million times in this community already, but the only post I found on this topic when I searched was over two years old.

I’ve been using PIA vpn for the past two years, but my subscription is ending soon and I was thinking about switching providers. I’m a fairly basic vpn user so I’m not overly concerned about advanced features and bells and whistles. I have a limited budget to work with, and I run Fedora os. Does anyone have any recommendations on what vpn I should be using?

I’ve seen Mullvad mentioned frequently, but it’s a touch expensive compared to others. I’ve heard some good things about Proton vpn too, but I know there was a controversy with their CEO not long ago. I’ve also just read something about IVPN and they look good, but I’d like opinions from more sources. I’m open too all other suggestions as well. Thanks for any and all thoughts!

-5 points

Surfshark, cheap and fast.

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1 point

They dropped shadowsocks support and now mostly standard protocols like the rest. Plus logging activity like supervpn. Bro advice: Skip it.

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1 point

Surfshark does not log anything actually. No-logs VPN: what you do online is your business - Surfshark https://share.google/bvvVGtjs4JCs4HlJn

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2 points

My mistake, thanks for correcting me.

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6 points

I ended up self hosting my own in a privacy-friendly low-cost VPS after trying everything in some censorship heavy locations (SuperVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad, Surfshark, Frog{something}VPN …) & rotating the address from time to time (I using a domain name so I don’t have to change all the clients). My private one uses whatever new obfs protocol pops up and some other things to make fingerprinting very hard. Combining this with residential proxies & TOR+private bridges for browsing works like a charm EVERYWHERE.

Commercial VPNs all fail because they use standard protocols and are very easy to fingerprint if you try enough.

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3 points
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Must be expensive to use residential proxies, nah? If I can ask, what’s your host?

Unless you’re not doing anything illegal and just using some friends’ IP and stuff

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4 points

Regarding residential proxy, it will be okay, 1usd per GB in packetstream.

For VPS, I use AlexHost as they dont require id, plus crypto payments (I wish I could use something else, capsul.org is overpriced and much lower quality)

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4 points
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Thanks

When you say you would prefer using something else, it’s about crypto or the host not being good?

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20 points
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The Proton CEO thing was vastly overblown. He is a privacy advocate and expressed support for Trump’s appointment for head of antitrust, as well as criticism of corporate Democrats who stand for big business which was misrepresented as a love of the Republican Party. The only mistake he made was to publish those statements using the official Proton account, which he later apologised for.

Some people, especially the American left, love to virtue signal and predictably they tried to cancel Proton as a result of this pretty minor and irrelevant social media drama. There were some good write-ups at the time which exposed how counterfactual the “pRoToN lOvEs mAgA” arguments were, but I guess feel free to skip over Proton if it really concerns you. It is objectively one of the best choices if you value both privacy and functionality (Proton still has support for port forwarding), which I think are far more relevant areas to be looking at when choosing a VPN for piracy.

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17 points

Okay but his criticism makes no sense when the FTC under biden actually started taking antitrust seriously and has since lost its teeth again under trump.

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2 points

It makes a lot of sense if you actually take the time to read his explanation of the context behind his position.

During the Biden administration, the Democrats lead by Schumer (whose family members are lobbyists for big tech) refused to bring antitrust bills Proton campaigned in support of to a vote. Additionally, the only invited senator to show up to a 2024 antitrust meeting was a Republican - Vance. Those are just two examples he cites of Democrats failing in this area and Republicans stepping up in their place.

The crazy thing is that Yen’s argument, that the Democrats have been captured by the corporate donor class, would be supported in any other context by people on reddit and particularly Lemmy. It’s the same thing you guys constantly complain about everywhere else (i.e. Sanders), yet in this one specific instance you ignore all of that and pretend that the Democrats are the good guys who can do no wrong because the idea that they could be as bad as, or worse than, the Republicans in this very specific area triggers you so hard.

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0 points

Democrats are bad. Republicans are worse.

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8 points

And the Proton CEO tweet about Trump looking out for the little guys is such an insane MAGA echo chamber take. It throws the credibility of the entire post into question. Not to mention that it’s a Medium article. Too many red flags that it undermines OP’s point pretty quick.

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5 points

@emogu @OccasionallyFeralya sorry, this comes from my ignorance, not to polarize or anything like that but, why Medium is a red flag?

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3 points

The eternal loop of looking for the Best vpn

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15 points

Just go with Mullvad

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3 points

It has its issues but so far the most reasonable.

(If you are in a censorship heavy area, go with something else, Mullvad relies on standard protocols that are easy to inspect and shut down)

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0 points

Nope. Do your homework!!

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