And if you use one, are you happy with it?
I’m trying to get more into privacy and security and VPN is currently a struggle for me (and it seems also for some people in my social circle). It’s mostly cost, effectiveness, but also connection issues (not being able to connect to servers, not reaching websites, sometimes slower speed.
Over the past few years, there has been a great increase in websites using geoblocking. Half the local news sites in the USA block traffic from the EU for example, likely because they want to inject 300 advertising trackers in a manner that would violate EU law. I’ve been using Mullvad for years, and I am happy with it.
Sometimes lemmy.world blocks me from posting from it, which I am not happy with. They were even critical of its strict privacy stance, which I found to be a weird take from a fediverse project.
I do understand their reasons, yet the majority of lemmy.world is shitposting assholes so there’s some flaws somewhere…
I understand Lemmy doesn’t provide a way to fuse multiple signals like the combination of a high-reputation account with a low-reputation IP address and it would be too much to ask volunteer server admins to develop their own. I’m OK with that answer. I don’t expect to dictate the terms by which they give me free services.
The part I didn’t like was their dim view of the fact that Mullvad actually provides privacy to its users. I believe private internet access is valuable to the world even if it enables some harms.