Tldr: capitalist efficiency

There is a neat piece about the OS side; worth reading.

As someone who went with the Mullvad suggestion despite having heard about port forwarding, I think a big part of why is because whenever it comes up people don’t take the time to explain why port forwarding is important. Until I asked in this thread the only thing I’d seen is some vague handwaving about it being faster.

I’ve only just dipped my toes in so maybe this is off base, but the community seems to have an elitism problem. If the people who know are dismissive of ignorant noobs who want to learn, the long term health of the community suffers for it.

Oh yikes. Thanks for explaining!

What’s wrong with not using port forwarding?

The prison industrial complex: hold my beer

You can have both, but they go to the same inbox. At least, I haven’t tried having separate inboxes without separate accounts.

That being said, it’s easy to set up filters to folders based on the domain or email.

There’s definitely problems with that option. But in the situation you described I’d just say fuck you and close the page rather than support that. People immediately leaving is probably worse than bad questions don’t get answers.

An abstain, maybe? Would also be useful for questions that you won’t know enough to answer. Then if you keep getting hung juries you know you’re asking bad questions.

It works for me… I think it’s something like it goes faster with port forwarding but to be honest I don’t know the details.

As a general rule, if you’re getting a service for free, you’re the product.

I don’t know much about the downsides of free in the context of VPNs, as I didn’t really get in to the technical ins and outs. But when we’re talking security and privacy I think the cost of supporting something good and sustainable is well worth it.

I’ve heard port forwarding is helpful for speed, and that might be a paid only thing, but to be honest I’m consistently surprised by how fast things go for me just using mullvad.

Another thing you may wish to consider: the Proton CEO has praised Trump which is a huge red flag to me in the privacy space.

These resources are really all you need, but they’re all individually quite focused so for a new person it can be hard to see the forest.

An overview:

For movies, streaming sites are fine.

To start torrenting safely:

• get a paid vpn (i use mullvad)
• download qbittorrent or the like
• find a public tracker from the megathead, general ones are easy/convenient for starting imo
• virus scan/use common sense/be careful

It’s good to check in about what kind of support folks want!

It’s what I use and it works well for me. It seemed like the best option when I was researching this recently. Plus the icon is cute.