Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton’s trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.
Honest, stupid question: Why exactly is this such a big deal to so many of you? (I don’t use Mastodon.)
Yup, no sorry. Only bots left in reddit, have fun!
yet another reason to use mastodon, because they can’t control it yet.
Can you even use Reddit if you’re running Proton’s VPN? I know Reddit has been actively blocking other VPNs (eg Mullvad) for some time.
Yes they have a stealth feature that is helpful for detecting a VPN
I wish VPS providers didn’t commonly block email ports. Self hosting seems like the only way to stay in control
It’s understandable though, they just don’t want to deal with email spammers.
Makes me glad that I procrastinated on switching over, I guess I’ll just ride out my current NordVPN subscription and switch over to Mullvad?
Almost makes me afraid to ask the community, what exactly is wrong with Nord? 😅
Unless you never want to torrent, I would say to not use mullvad, you can’t forward a port with them (same with NordVPN). There are plenty of VPNs that don’t log and allow port forwarding. I use AirVPN.
I’ve not encountered any issues filling up my NAS with torrented Linux ISOs via NordVPN?
My priority for a VPN has just been no logging and the ability to ‘travel’ internationally… so if there the case, no need to rush out and switch then?
https://lemm.ee/post/56692320/18526252
A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.
So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.
As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn’t work.
Yeah, speeds are far greater with port forwarding. But, if you’re not in a hurry, I suppose it’s nbd
Looks like I’m leaving Proton. Fucking hell, not even a year ago I migrated from Gmail
Me too. Same predicament. I was a paid user of Proton.
Just got moved over to paid Tuta, and it seemed to go smoothly.
Learn your lesson and switch to a custom domain :) that way you will never have to change all your services’ email addresses anymore, when you want to switch mail provider.
Yeah, this is gonna be my next move I think. I was using Proton VPN for a while and just recently started migrating my emails there, then they started doing all of this.
I wanted to self host my email anyway, but now I have no excuse. I’ve been burned by the last team I expected it to come from, I’ll be self-reliant now
SAME! I only just finished getting all my servers and custom domain set up, and I already have to look for a new provider.
If someone has any recommendations for a good hosted email, VPN and online storage provider let us know. It seems there’s not many good options left.
It’s as if with each passing day, Proton wakes up and chooses to wear a slightly different red flag for a cape than the one they wore yesterday. I’m obviously being hyperbolic here, but I’m also a bit upset with myself for having decided to get an annual subscription with them last November.
I’ve heard good things about Mullvad for VPN and Tuta for mail. I’ve got my own domain that I can start using with whatever mail host I land on.
I’m in the U.S. What other mail providers are people using, and what other VPN providers should I be considering?
If you ever want to torrent, some service that allows port forwarding, like AirVPN or PureVPN. A popular alternative of mullvad does not allow this.
I just wanted to follow back up on this helpful comment here and the ones along with it from other posters. After testing and review, combined with what folks explained below, I can say for sure I’m looking for a service with port forwarding. And now I understand how someone could unknowingly offload the port forwarding responsibility to other parties thereby making torrents less accessible than may have been intended while mistakenly being under the impression they were providing equitable accessibility just because “it looks like it’s working”.
I feel like this should have been more obvious way sooner, but my skull is remarkably thick it seems. Thanks for helping me wrinkle my brain a little more today.
You keep posting this and I haven’t been using port forwarding at all but torrents keep coming through. What am I missing here? Serious question, because I do not know what I’m either doing wrong or missing out on with port forwarding and I have not been experiencing what I would call a degraded experience as far as I can tell, but there’s a whole world of things that I’m entirely ignorant to.
A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.
So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.
As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn’t work.
Thanks, this is a little difficult to parse while I’m looking at my seeds uploading at ratios well over 1.00 but just the same I’m running a new VPN tunnel with port forwarding enabled to see what difference it makes.
Plex works for the people I share with outside my network. No port forwarding. I just don’t get what I am not getting, and every explainer I get is basically what you posted (no offense) and it doesn’t match what my experience is showing me.
Here is it illustrated by multiple examples:
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
- Another person with ports closed wants to get the torrent. They will never be able to get it since you two can’t establish a connection.
- Another person with an open port wants to get the torrent. Eventually, after some delay, your client connects to the tracker and gets a list of people who want to get the torrent (leechers). You get the IP and port of the person who wants to get the torrent, you connect to them, you start uploading to them.
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, but have ports open
- No matter if a leecher has ports closed or open, they get your IP+Port from the tracker, connect to you, and you upload to them
The situation with more clients is more nuanced, but essentially the same:
- Situation: There are 5 seeders with open ports seeding a torrent
- Everything works perfectly all the time
- Situation: There are 5 seeders with closed ports seeding a torrent
- For a leecher with open port, everything works perfectly
- For a leecher with closed port, they will never get the torrent ever
- Situation: There are 5 seeders seeding a torrent. 4 have their ports closed, 1 has it open.
- 10 leechers with ports closed want to get the torrent. The only one that can upload to them is the 1 seeder with port open, the other 4 seeders are useless.
- 10 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent. All 5 seeders seed their torrent equally and everything works perfectly.
- 5 leechers with ports closed and 5 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent.
- The 5 leechers with ports closed are only serviced by the 1 seeder with port open
- The 5 leechers with port open get the torrent from all 5 seeders.
- The 1 seeder with open port seeds to every leecher, the protocol doesn’t discriminate. So in a perfectly equal world, the 1 seeder with port open seeds to all 10 leechers, so each leecher gets 1/10th of their upload speed.
- The 4 seeders with closed port only seed to the 5 leechers with open port, giving each of them 1/5th of their upload speed.
- This means that, if you add this all up, the 5 leechers with closed ports get 1/10th (1 seeder times 1/10th) of one seeders’ full upload speed, while the leechers with open ports get 9/10ths (1 seeder times 1/10th and 4 seeders times 2/10ths) of one seeders’ full upload speed.
as you can see, the people with open ports have a massive speed advantage in this example, literally getting 9 times the upload speed available in the network. But essentially, torrenting still works as long as some people have open ports, just everyone with closed ports is at a severe disadvantage.
Now there are a couple more issues with closed ports (like DHT/pex not working) but they all boil down to the same problem: the ones with closed ports can only get stuff from people with open ports. Thus they are at a massive disadvantage and get reduced speeds or in contrived situations with few seeders even nothing.
- Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
I think port forwarding is more important for seeding when it comes to torrents. Someone has to be able to initiate the connection.
Well that is something I’ll need to look into. My seed ratios seem to be keeping up too though, so I’m still not sure if port forwarding is a solution in search of a problem on my end. I guess I have more learning to do. Thank you for giving me a direction to start investigating.
If you’re not port-forwarding, only peers that are port-forwarding can download from you. And you can only download from peers that are port-forwarding. There can be times where a torrent only has a few seeders, but they are not port-forwarding, and if you’re not either, you won’t be able to download the torrent.
Ah ok thank you, I think the fact that the other party could be providing this capability was the component that I wasn’t conceptualizing before. Thank you for this post, I don’t know why this was so hard to grasp for me but this landed.
I’ve used Mullvad VPN for almost a year and it’s amazing. I only switched to Proton because I use all their services.
I was an apologist for Proton during the whole Andy Yen commentary mess, but this is a really sus choice for Proton to be making.
All that matters under capitalism is growth. I wonder if the thinking here is that Proton has already captured all the geek/privacy enthusiast crowd that it’s going to, and Andy Yen’s social fuck-up basically killed any future expansion in that space, so this is part of a pivot to new markets and abandonment of areas they know they aren’t going to win back.
If so, I’d expect to see Proton making expanded ad buys targeting preppers, libertarians, sov-cit types and other “I’m being watched!!” kooks.
They’re focusing on platforms that allow them to censor discussion.
Same. I’ll be shopping around for something else when my sub comes up.
Ugh, I use proton for VPN and email. Any suggestions for decent VPN at this point?
AirVPN is great, allows port forwarding, 5 devices, and they run very good black Friday specials every year if you decide to buy it after trialling.
I’ve used Mullvad for a couple of years now and they’re great.
Unless you never want to torrent, I would not choose mullvad. Torrenting requires port forwarding if you properly want to give back to the community, which mullvad doesn’t support.
Thank you!
I don’t have any complaints with Nord but other people seem to.
Nord has no port forwarding. No deal
I had it for over a year and then, one day, every time I stepped outside my home, it would go into “connecting…” and never come back.
I’d have to go into settings and completely deleted it, then re-add. I gave up, and went to proton. Literally zero issues until the ceo started praising nazis
“limited resources” wtf? just copy and paste the content. I guess they didn’t like the backslash on Mastodon because of the CEO and Trump bootlicker Andy Yen
This is even more ridiculous given they have a bluesky account and all they need to do is follow the bridge and their content will be ported to mastodon. Literally 5 seconds.
Yeah not even copy paste, this has been easily automatable for years.
Oh yeah that’s prob it. On Reddit they can delete any negative comments
It’s the age of stinginess
Does anyone know of a good alternative to simple login? They’re owned my proton too and I have about 150+ aliases to move
Life changing. SimpleLogin sucks so much.
On Mastodon, Proton is held to a higher standard. That’s why they left for the dumb masses instead.
Didn’t the CEO of Proton lick the Trump boot recently?
They did, yes.
I’m assuming the next video to be released will be of the Proton CEO and Trump on on some fetish.
“oh yeah, encrypt me daddy”
Andy is a cuck.
Fucking disgusting
People on here like complain and will tell that he has his balls in his mouth when in reality all he did was show some hope after the Republicans appointed someone who has a track record of being anti-bigtech. I still think the way the situation was handled terribly, but to say that he is MAGA would be a hell of a stretch in my opinion
So it came as a surprise last month when Proton CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party in a post on X, declaring that “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” When the tweet went viral, Proton’s official Reddit account posted a now-deleted comment stating that “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”
show some hope huh
Yeah so uh youre proving my point, he’s happy that the nominated person is more favorable to small businesses than the one previously nominated by the Democrats. Wether it’s true or false I don’t know, but this post (and his other posts form before and after the event) to me don’t suggest MAGA
Then I just don’t know what to tell ya. It’s right there.
I wonder how that’s working out for him.
If you’re looking to shake up your email provider in the wake of this, I highly recommend getting a custom domain name, whatever provider you choose. Cloudflare sells domains at cost. Get a not-embarrasing
.comof your own, and then you can move email providers in future without losing continuity. Proton allows exporting.emlfiles, which you can then import into your next provider. Or just keep in cold storage and declare email bankruptcy. Once you have a custom domain, you can use unique emails for all your services by setting up a catchall address. This will at least impede credential stuffing attacks, and let you know who sold/leaked your address if you do get spam.I personally left Proton a month or so ago after the last bit of drama, in part out of principle, but also because their offering is just really expensive for my use case: I just want email, on a budget, with reasonable privacy. Plus I was tired of not having IMAP support and being locked into their clients. Moved to a Zoho business account (for now) and have been happy for the $12/yr. I already had a domain name, but they typically run <$20/year too.
Get an embarrassing domain, then give that one out to all the shitty stores that ask you for an email. Bonus points if it will make people extremely uncomfortable.
