planned Proton replacement
(midwest.social)
inlandempire
PrivacyI've cancelled my subscription yesterday, conveniently it was about to renew at the end of the week, so I have a few days to migrate from Proton, here's what I'm thinking of, but I'd love to hear what other people are switching to
https://meet.jit.si/ for free meetings replacements.
Bitwarden is pivoting towards the same enshittification path as everything else, so that’s not gonna be a good long term for a password manager. They hired a new ceo whose only noteworthy experience is prepping companies for mergers and acquisitions, and briefly removed messaging on their website about always having a free tier which they reinstated after backlash. All signs point to a sinking ship, imo.
I don’t have the answer for what to use instead since I’m still a paid subscriber with them, but I’m looking around. Probably keepassxc but I don’t know enough to host and sync my own.
Vaultwarden is a great alternative.
I don't think Keepass does syncing. I just leave the database in my Nextcloud sync folder on my desktop, and I can always pull the latest version to my phone. It'd be a bit more annoying if I routinely added new entries from my phone since Android won't let the NC app maintain bidirectional sync, but I pretty much always do it from my desktop, so the workflow is fine for me personally. If you do it on your phone, you can upload the changed version, but I think you'd have to do it manually, so not a great flow, but if it's a rarity, not too big a deal to me.
Walt.is seems to be a promising wallet alternative even if you use a degoogled device.
I'm tired of keeping a book of grudges everytime a CEO says something. I'll be waiting for now.
how about tuta mail?
I've been using it for about a year for random stuff but weirdly i do not enjoy the ux
this is exhausting
It is. I just made the switch last year and spent forever making hide-my-e-mail adresses for every service , web page and online store I had subscribed to. My Proton subscription just renewed so I guess I’ll wait another 11 months to see how this pans out before I make a decision.
Don't worry, it'll keep going. There are so few exceptions to multi-product companies becoming shit in the long term
I don't know if I'd still suggest Bitwarden with the dual-licensing drama from not too long ago and the new CEO.
https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden
Thanks for that. I've moved to mailbox to, i've bought a domain and i use addy.io for aliases. I've also choosen KeepassXC to replace proton pass and i use Syncthing to keep the data of keepassxc up to date between my PC and my phone. And i think i will self host for the drive soon (waiting for black weeks to try to but a beelink s12 pro cheaper). For A2F : Aegis. Everything runs well on my Graphene OS phone. Do we really need vpn while we can use good DNS settings ?
KeepassXC and Strongbox on iOS. using mailbox.org webdav (via rclone mount for KeepassXC) for my vault sync, plus yubikey slot 2 HMAC challenge response which works great. Not missing vaultwarden too much
Hey login is a good Password manager and free
I've been very happy with purelymail
For 2FA I've been using Aegis (FOSS). Dunno how it compares to Ente Auth
I've used ente for several years. No account connected with it, but just for MFA tokens. It just works which is what I like and I never needed to provide it network access
I want to ditch Proton for obvious reasons but I’m really stuck on what VPN to switch to. They all seem to suck in their own special ways.
I wouldn't trust Bitwarden anymore. I don't believe they've done anything bad just yet, but they recently sold out to a private equity firm and quite literally removed "transparency" from their company values. KeePassXC is your friend.
But they replaced transparency with "trust" so surely we can trust them right? /s
Ahh too bad then I'll switch to Keepass yeah
I'm not sure if you are aware, but there is a reason why it is explicitly xc instead of just keepass. Xc is the Foss one & keepass is a corporate hell hole
Oh thats good to know thanks, yeah I meant XC but was too lazy haha
quite literally removed “transparency” from their company values
No they didnt. Why do people keep making up this bullshit?
"Bitwarden company values spell the word “GRIT,” and stand for:
- Gratitude
- Responsibility
- Innovation
- Trust"
It used to say Inclusion and Transparency, before they sold out.
IVPN is a well-established private VPN provider, with a strong track record.
Windscribe is also of note, being part of the cross-promotional circle of agreements with other established and trusted services such as Tuta, and Addy.io
Obscura is also worth a look for the especially privacy minded approach they take to running a VPN, essentially severing the entry and exit points of your network traffic across providers so that even if Obscura or their partners were to fail a user's privacy, there wouldn't be anything lost.
Mullvad is also a longstanding and respected VPN but I believe there's been pretty severe controversy around them recently, and that should be looked into before considering them. They were essentially the gold-standard up until recently.
All of these providers have a variety of anonymous payment methods, to varying degrees of convinience and anonimity.
How is IVPN when it comes to p2p file sharing?
Ivpn doesn't support port forwarding so it probably won't work well for filesharing. Private internet access has support for it, although I'm not thrilled with its jurisdiction atm, but that being said they have been subpoenaed before & were unable to produce logs so they probably aren't bsing their no log policy.
IVPN speeds are pretty bad IME, check if it works for you before committing to it
wow thanks for all those details!!
Felt like giving a little list off the top of my head instead of just going 'use what I use!'
If you want any assistance, I'm always open to help out :)
Yeah that's really good, thank you so much I'll ping you or DM you if something comes up that I can't solve on my own if you don't mind
👍
I've known someone who uses both Proton's VPN and the Mullvad one. From what I saw when I tested theirs, the Proton one manages to get through and works with frontends, whereas Mullvad doesn't always, but it's got more finetuning.
Mullvad's co-founder funds the Swedish alt-right
That's the part that confuses me. Mullvad has distanced itself from his stance. As for the party..:
::: spoiler My analysis The party he supports has been claimed to be Marxist, and elements of that can be seen in it favouring a 30-hour workweek, strong secularism, making public transit free of charge, as well expanding social housing.
However, it (falsely) aligns workers with the business class, thus showing elements of favouring the bourgeoise rather than the proletariat; it also is nationalist in character, rather than internationalist, and wishes to deport fellow labourers. Moreover, it disfavours green energy and is thus a tool of the global capitalist coal and petrol companies. It also opposes liberating the worker from gender-based negative discrimination, because it wants to abolish quotas.
Since their policies don't support inherent change of power structures, nor liberate the worker from discrimination, I would label them as revisionist marxists due to their alliance with the oligarchs. :::
Proton on the other hand, has confirmed donations that tend to be for organisations which I'd label as broadly progressive, but generally towards the centre-left. However, their CEO is obsessed by AI and has supported a statement of Trump. So it's really crazy.
Yes, yes he does. 😏
I've been using KeePassXC with Syncthing for years and it's been great as a password manager for myself. But I don't need to share those credentials with anyone.
Does keepass have a reputable browser extension or is the application itself all that's used? I think that's what moved me off Keepass initially after using it for like six years and then moving to BitWarden a few years ago
I'm not sure what you mean by reputable, but I've been using the official KeePassXC extension.
I assume the point of the extension is to have support for autofill, if that is the case, you should be aware that it is generally a bad idea to give your browser access to that info directly since they are the definition of internet connected apps. What I do instead of autofill with keepassxc is open the vault and press the copy to clipboard buttons which works essentially the same way as autofill just with a couple more clicks.
When you use an extension for that task it also validades the URL, which helps to not type by accident your credentials in a fake website.
Same, plus a yubikey for 2FA
Aegis is my chosen 2FA. never have been convinced on hardware keys personally.
Fair enough. I like the ease of simply touching it. It's less of a frustration for when my wife wants to access my password manager
You could also use Vaultwarden an open source fork of Bitwarden. It works with the official app and don’t know why you need Ente for 2FA as Bitwarden/Vaultwarden also covers that AFAIK
Vaultwarden is not a fork, it's a reimplementation of the server.
Usually the point of 2fa is to protect the account if the password is comprimised, so not keeping the password and the 2fa in the same place seems logical
Okay but this also implies that Vaultwarden with your passwords was compromised. I understand your point having passwords and 2FA in two separate places but in the end having 2FA at all is better than not having it even if you have it in the same place.
I second vaultwarden Rec I’ve been using it for a while. It doesn’t have TOTP or other 2FA features tho as far as I’m aware so I do vaultwarden + Ente and it works well
Password manager is too important for me to self-host IMO
Well, for me, a password manager is too important to entrust to a for-profit company.
Bitwarden keeps a copy of your vault on clients.
So even if you lose your Vaultwarden/Bitwarden server files, you will have a local copy on every device you use.
For those of us who do need Drive for cloud storage, any suggestions? I'm looking for around 2tb. Please don't say self hosted NAS.
I haven’t tried it, but there is filen.io which offers 2 TiB for 8.99€/mn.
i've moved to filen.io for a few years now, no complaints so far.
Out of curiosity, why not self hosted NAS?
I've been pretty happy with mine.
I already manage a lot of self hosted stuff, and this cloud storage is specifically for my crucial off-site backups.
Understandable. Sadly, you can't exactly set up an off-site backup in your living room, no matter how much you want to.
When someone doesn't want self hosted NAS, it feels like they often just dn't want to bother with it. While I haven't used them myself, I've heard good things about ready made NAS boxes.
For self built, it has been too hassle free in my experience. I want to tinker more with the NAS part, but it is just too reliable & maintenance free!
While I know that they're different, the more common reasons for not wanting a NAS just remind me a bit of some "reasons" to not care about digital privacy or security.
What are all of you people using VPNs for?
mostly porn, because my “free” state requires i provide government id to whack my stick
but also 🏴☠️
Trying to avoid tracking if only a little bit, including by my ISP.
Using public unencrypted WiFi, like what you find at an airport or McDonald’s.
The cell communications network lawful intercept backdoor was popped a couple years ago.
ELI5 why Mailbox.org instead of Tuta?
Both are good options, but ATM the tuta protocol isn't standardized which means you are relying on tuta maintaining their favorable stance on privacy, unlike other providers which still have support for IMAP and pop. ATM if you go with tuta you are committing to both their infrastructure & client whereas most other providers you don't have to use their client.
For Mailbox there's also Tuta.
For VPNs you could consider IVPN. It's Gibraltar-based.
As for document collaboration; Cryptpad.
Bitwarden is US-based; see here - "Bitwarden Inc. is incorporated in the State of Delaware in the United States of America. 8bit Solutions LLC is wholly owned by Bitwarden Inc.". That said, it's OSS and can be hosted locally.
Tuta seems to provide a very good service, but I personally just can't justify going all-in on a provider which doesn't use open standards. Encryption that essentially only works between Tuta inboxes just doesn't promote an open ecosystem. Although, if that isn't a concern, they are probably the best contender in a lot of respects.
They're also quickly enshittifying. At this point I'd never trust a US company with anything related to my privacy/security.
Which one is quickly enshittifying?
Bitwarden. The trajectory has not been inspiring. Changes to licensing and private equity getting involved.
Ill check out ivpn, thanks for the tip!
I’m trying out a few CPNs on iOS. This far Windscribe is good with a 10gb free limit. Psiphon has been good too. I have Orbot to try next for VPN over TOR.
I have found that https://www.privacyguides.org/ is a decent directory of privacy-friendly services, with plenty of discussion on their forums. Additionally, Tuta's DeGoogle List also lists some suggestions worth a look.
When looking for alternatives, take care to review that the provider has export options for all of their services before commiting in case you ever wish to move again. This is a problem I have found with Proton Drive, which makes it very easy to back up and import photos from your phone and other services, but lacks an export feature, requiring manually selecting and downloading each photo manually.
Anyone migrating from Proton should also consider emailing the board, as outlined by unionising Proton employees on https://molecule.build/.
It's not realistic right now to recommend an offline LLM due to average hardware. Sounds nice though.
Strata makes it workable with low vram cards like 8 or 12gb.
I’ve been using Atomic Chat on my archaic iPhone 11 and it works well enough for my needs. Haven’t had much luck with several others, but that one works fine.
If you can selfhost but don't have the hardware for running the LLM itself. I currently have OpenWebUI setup linked to openrouter. Definitely not fully private but I've chosen only "Zero Data Retention" providers. Then on top of that be vary careful what you're asking.
I have a lower-end GPU (8GB VRAM) and I can still run smaller models on it with decent performance.
Dumb question: what do people use those local LLMs even for?
What does "lower-end" mean in this case? 8GB VRAM could be anything from a 2014 Radeon R9 290X to a 2026 RTX 5060.
IVPN or AirVPN (depending on whether or not you need port-forwarding) is my VPN recommendation.
Is it just me or is the room spinning faster?
this community used to be full of proton fanboys -- i'm genuinely surprised that this hasn't been downvoted into oblivion because of it.
Proton has had very bad press past week. In case you missed it, an article came out exposing an internal work culture that very much did not match up with what customers were being sold, including potentially sidelining security to prioritize speed of development of new features.
you're preaching to the choir -- i stopped trusting them when their ceo needlessly voiced support for ttrump and i shared my comment because i've been experiencing the downvotes/anger from the proton brigade on lemmy for it.
Probably because Proton just went full Ai enshittification.
Been using AirVPN. Just make sure you use the wireguard config, not the tcp openvpn (not sure about the udp openvpn, but people seem to recommend the wireguard option and I accidentally used the tcp openvpn config at first).
Seconding KeypassXC.
I got airvpn a few days ago, what's wrong with openvpn?
Specific the tcp config. Tcp adds an extra handshake for every transaction, so I was getting like 2.5 Mbps.
For VPN I do like AirVPN a lot.
I do currently use Bitwarden for my 2FA as well as my passwords, though I should look into Ente Auth.
Self hosted bit warden is rad I imported the DBs of all my Google account password managers and never looked back. Works great on my mobile device for passkeys/biometric also
This perfectly sums up my situation. I'm currently trialing a free Tuta mail account and a Mailfence account (freeee)
Waiting for expert reviews of the alternative VPN options.
I use Aliasvault as Passwordmanager and Riseup VPN. They are great!
