I keep hearing bad stuff about proton, but I don’t really get most of it. Could someone please explain all of the controversy to me. Lastly, what are the best alternatives to all of their services?

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[–] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

Mail - Tuta Mail

VPN - IVPN or AirVPN (Never been independently audited but cheaper and has port forwarding)

Drive - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Drive

Calendar - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Calendar

Docs/Sheets - Selfhost Nextcloud or LibreOffice (offline)

Pass - Bitwarden or KeePassXC (offline)

Authenticator - 2FA or Aegis (both are offline but that's a good thing with 2FA)

Meet - Jitsi

Lumo - Local AI or Kagi Assistant (paid, comes with privacy-focused search engine) or Duck.ai (free)

Wallet - Cake Wallet

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    Drive: Filen, Jottacloud

    VPN: NymVPN

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    NymVPN is too new for me to feel comfortable using personally.

    Also it seems that they worked with Brave which I'm certainly not a fan of.

    I wouldn't recommend Jottacloud as their privacy policy seems iffy and they don't have e2ee.

    Filen's privacy policy seems better, although they do say they do analytics. They do have e2ee though. Definitely much closer to Tuta than Jottacloud.

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  • Harry Halpin is the CEO of Nym and is at least a CEO who’s politically on the good side. And Chelsea Manning works for Nym.

    Yeah, the Brave Ad-block and no WireGuard Configs are not so good, but so far I enjoy NymVPN.

    People who use Jottacloud should encrypt their data before sending it over.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I've been curious about Nextcloud as a self hosted storage area. But I've not really found clear information if my use case works well with it. I have more or less just a network share that plenty of services and sources has access to (immich, local computers, syncthing, jellyfin etc.) but as I understand it Nextcloud doesn't like files being modified externally as it keeps quite hefty indexing of all the files. But I've also heard you can mount "external" storage in Nextcloud that it would be less mad about.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I once saw people also recommend airvpn in the same context as ivpn, do they also have some issues or are they just too unknown?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    I like IVPN because it feels like a pretty drop-in replacement for Mullvad. It's also available on Accrescent which is great for anyone using GrapheneOS.

    As for AirVPN, I thought you needed an email to sign up but after checking their sign up page, it seems you can enter whatever string you want for your email.

    They also support port forwarding unlike IVPN so if that's super important to you maybe AirVPN is the way to go.

    It also seems AirVPN is slightly cheaper year by year and significantly cheaper if you buy 3 years at a time.

    AirVPN has never had an independent security audit though, so if that concerns you IVPN is the way to go.

    Otherwise, it seems like AirVPN is a real contender if you're worried about price and/or port forwarding. Maybe I'll give both of them a try before I commit to one (still waiting for my Mullvad days to run out).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    What happened to mullvad? It used to be protonvpn and them as default recommendations, now it's another two.

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