I’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
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 108 users / day
- 246 users / week
- 454 users / month
- 1.13K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 4.98K Posts
- 122K Comments
- Modlog
i was already using ente auth, i went straight back to bitwarden, and i was on the free tier the whole time on proton anyway
VPN is easy, just setup a Wireguard instance on either a Hetzner shared vCPU Linux VPS for €6.49 a month for or IONOS XS Linux VPS for about £2.40 a month. Wireguard takes like at most 10 commands to get running.
And then to make sure your data is anonymised give your family and trusted friends (apart from the hacky or sketchy type) a Wireguard VPN profile to connect. The more people the harder it is to pinpoint who is using it. I route my and my family’s traffic through Falkenstein, DE with @hetzner@mastodon.hetzner.social
For password I use KeePassXC and KeePassDX, and for 2fa I use YubiKey, it can store 2FA secrets and also do hardware 2FA, very useful.
Obsidian is proprietary. It can go fuck itself.
I switch from obsidian to Joplin because it has e2ee while obsidian does not but they’re kinda cut from the same cloth
I’ve switched email providers a few times, but I bought a custom domain and use that as my email address. Which makes switching providers easy. I’m sure I don’t need to mention that in a Privacy community, but figured I would anyway.
I went from an @gmail, to @proton (then bought the domain), then switched to Fastmail with same domain.
Tuta for mail
Mullvad for VPN
Logseq for notes
Keepass for passwords
Kraken is pretty good for wallets as far as I’m concerned (?)
Tuta is also going full AI (slower than proton)
Mullvad is co-owned by someone heavily financing a far-right party
yeah man ig we just have to choose the less shitty between the two these days
I’ve been using mailbox.org for a few years now and I love it.
the web client is good, and it was easy to set up on my phone alongside my other accounts.
it costs money (something like €3/year), but it’s worth it.
plus, it’s still relatively new, so if you suffer from Generic White Guy Name™ like I do, you can finally have a username/email address that’s not full of numbers.
I switched to mailbox from proton and put addy.io in front of it for custom domains and aliasing
You’re better off adding a custom domain anyway, that way you’re not vendor locked and you can move the emails with ease. It’s included in all the subs I think.
can i ask for more details about the email address and generic names thing? I’m not sure i understand whar you mean sorry
Basically there’s no way you could get an email address of just: [first][last]@gmail.com on Gmail, because there are so many users of Gmail. That’s not the case for newer services with less users.
ohhh right that makes sense thanks
You could check posteo.de for email services, I didn’t have any issues with them since I opened the account about a year ago.
Edit: addition
I’d choose KeepasXC over Bitwarden since it has a built in 2fa which is convenient to.use and made me have much more 2fa configured over less critical services. Most critical services I have 2fa for are separated in a different 2fa method Aegis. Yubikeys and such are top level of course but they require a bit more responsibility in usage.
I thought the general consensus was to not bundle your 2fa and pwd manager. If your master password is compromised then they have both authentication methods.
FWIW, I’ve been really happy with Aegis for my 2fa needs. Still using Bitwarden but they seem to be ripe for some enshittification in the near future so I’m cautiously looking into Vaultwarden, then Keepass.
I’m too nervous to have Bitwarden be both my password manager and 2FA service
I have the same concerns. I use 2fa in the password manager only for non essential services. All essential services are on a different 2fa system, so its easy to use 2fa on most services (more protection overall) but the critical stuff would still be protected if the vault gets leaked somehow.
Posteo would have been my first choice actually but unfortunately they do not seem to support custom domains, otherwise I would switch to them instead of mailbox, on paper it sounds like they have more features for cheaper
Pretty funny to suggest anti-open-source Obsidian ina privacy subreddit
A what?
Oops
Pretty funny to reference anti-open-source reddit in a privacy community
If you’re not paying for sync services and cautious about which community plugins you choose, what is the risk factor? Genuinely asking, not being a contrarian on purpose.
I’ve stuck with Obsidian for the simple reason that the file format is a folder of plain text files. So data extraction if I decide to leave to another app is easy. Joplin changes the text file names and adds metadata to each file which is no good in my use case. So I’ve skipped it.
What are some good alternatives? Preferably with a web-client. I am pretty limited in installing software at work.
I’ve been using Logseq for a couple years now and it’s great
Notesnook is an option that has a web-client as well as apps for pretty much any OS. They do have a free tier, but several features are hidden behind a paywall, so be aware of that.
Joplin would be the typical example, but silverbullet is neat.
I’m currently using zennotes. It has a self hosted option which is a web version.
I can’t seem to find any information on where the company is from. I’ll try to stick with European software, not necessarily because it’s better or more secure, but out of principle. My experience is that if they don’t mention where it’s from it’s most likely not US :)
The Contact section on their Cloud privacy policy has a lumarylabs.com email address, and sure enough that site says Lumary Labs is based in the US.
Tuta for email perhaps?
Has anyone unlinked their SimpleLogin account from Proton? I see its an option, but curious what will happen. I was a subscriber seperately prior to Proton but linked them up later. This will be the harder thing to migrate so if I can keep just simpleLogin going for a while longer. So many aliases :(
It should work without, that was the original idea. But it is owned by Proton now.
If you end up having to create another SL account - this could be useful https://simplelogin.io/docs/getting-started/transfer-alias/
Windscribe has been good to me as a VPN.
Can’t recommend Windscribe enough!
I would maybe hold off on choosing Bitwarden. Around the time they raised their pricing they started getting venture capitalist money so the enshittification there may be coming. As far as alternatives, the only other one I’ve used besides Proton is KeePass which could be make or break depending on how you setup the vault, I’d probably save it in something pCloud so you aren’t screwed should something happen to your server, but YMMV.
I recently found https://www.aliasvault.com/. It is still in early-ish development but the 1.0 release including a security audit is planned for end of this or beginning of next year. The main developer is also very active on https://www.privacyguides.org/ and listens to community feedback.
Cant wait for it to mature a bit. Right now my biggest gripe is UI/UX related.
I’ve now seen aliasvault so many times I’m starting to be suspicious of it. Thankfully its only been in this community so I can acknowledge that I’m the problem and not them, but it just reminds me of Omarchy a few months back having never heard of it and suddenly every tech YouTuber is mentioning it. Again, I’m the problem, aliasvault seems promising.
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.
KeepassDX on android. Any keepass .kdbx file opener on every OS. .kdbx file saved on a local network shared folder on an always on raspberry pi. Access the folder on all devices, open the file with keepass app.
No sync, no extra sync software, no dangling copies, changes are immediate, decryption happens on device not over the network. Step up to network share over sftp. Tailscale tunnel to access when away from home.
Which file opener on iOS?
this is the way.
bonus: put it on your NAS in a file-sync folder.
Vaultwarden is a great alternative.
However, Vaultwarden only implements the webvault, the client apps are still only supplied by Bitwarden, which they could make incompatible with Vaultwarden at some point.
Not true. You could also use Keyguard.
Which is a proprietary crap.
Their github page is public and you can review the code if you want to. What are you talking about?
Source available does not mean the same thing as Open Source.
Re-read my comment. Did I say “open source”? Also, I reiterate my question, what does it being source available entail for you? Is there anything more insecure? Is there something you can’t do? This sounds more like a pet peeve than an actual problem.
I’m talking about the license. It is proprietary.
What is it exactly that you want to do but can’t? Anyone can audit the code, you could see if they were doing something sketchy. Sounds lile you just want to complain.
That is what gives me pause with vaultwarden… the need for bitwarden proprietary apps.
Edit: i stand corrected they are not proprietary. Dont know if they could kill compatibility for vaultwarden if they chose to. That is a better explanation of my concern.
Well bitwarden.com has made changes that broke compatibility with rbw for certain things, but the main problem here IMO is rbw not getting updated
Are they proprietary?
They are not. They are GPL licensed.
My mistake. Sorry
the community already made a custom server that’s compatible with Bitwarden, I imagine if Bitwarden cut them off then they could make a custom client for it as well.
in fact I believe there are community made Bitwarden apps already for Linux desktops, although I never tried them because I just use the browser extension.
Yes, there is this one for example for Linux Mobile and Desktop:
https://flathub.org/de/apps/dev.bitritter.BitRitter
Indeed, and I do not like that I have to have another repository just for the bitwarden app.
I am not really worried though. If they completely fuck up, a fork of the app will be a matter of seconds.
Yeah… I’ve noticed as well… also interested in a good alternative.
Nextcloud passwords. If you don’t want to host yourself you get a free one when you sign up for a friendica account at libranet.de.
AFAIK the concept behind keepassxc is that it’s an encrypted
.kdbxfile that you sync yourself among your devices by any means you can. There are official apps for Windows/Linux/Mac, browser extensions for Firefox/Chrome/Chromium/Vivaldi, there’s integration with ssh-agent, and 3rd-party apps for Android and iOS.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.
write a bash script that rsyncs your keepass database to your other devices and run it once in a while. i have seen way too many online password vaults get hacked to ever bother with them.
better to use p2p multi-device/os synchronization software like syncthing or syncspirit (disclaimer: I’m the author)
Bitwarden is getting worse btw unless you’re running it yourself
Never understood the appeal, I’ve had my passwords in a keepass file on a Nextcloud server for years. If I’m gonna involve a third party, I night as well just use Firefox Sync (which I do for less important stuff)
I have all my passwords written down in a journal not in a computer
Yea… God I hate the world… I started using Bitwarden like… A few months ago, and they’re already going in the shitter…
It seems it hasn’t happened yet. They are still open source for now. I am still using my Vaultwarden with Bitwarden.
It seems it might be going that way though.
If it goes fully closed source then I imagine the fix will be Vaultwarden devs coding some replacement apps.
Yea they haven’t done anything yet but afaik they changed their licenses to prepare to do it… So it’s only a matter of time
they do at least make it very easy to migrate away
What did I miss?
Moving towards closed source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bitwarden-Open-Source-Concerns
Which takes away the only good thing about them
Wasn’t this reversed tho?
closed source security products are a contradiction in terms
I’m tired
yeah…