this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
66 points (97.1% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
62289 readers
233 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
🏴☠️ Other communities
FUCK ADOBE!
Torrenting/P2P:
Gaming:
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Mullvad. I don't even think about alternatives.
That was the case, but now that they no longer support port forwarding thinking about alternatives is a good idea. For me, a VPN without port forwarding is not an option (since I use private trackers).
Mullvad seemed like the perfect choice and I was happy with them until they killed port forwarding, that got me wanting to switch to something else.
I recently bought a year of AirVPN. Their apps aren't as nice but it works, and port forwarding works with the same port across all their servers.
I use Wiresock Secure Connect on Windows, and the Eddie app or OpenVPN Connect on Android.
on mint cinnamon, mullvad app prevents auto-suspending and screen timeout, idk if it does that on other distros. spent a full year troubleshooting and lost most of my hair and will to live. accidentally found the solution after switching to ivpn because it became impossible to watch youtube with mullvad
Mullvad is the correct answer.
What is it about Mullvad that makes it superior to all other options? I'm open to it, I just need something to justify the higher price.
No information needs to even be provided to them. No login, you just get a number (16 digits I think?). You can pay with untraceable Monero, and use the VPN anywhere as long as you have that number.
If you want.
$5 is a low price for a service that I trust way more than the others. You should wonder why the alternatives are so cheap.
It's about $8 CAD / month, which is noticeably more than Air vpn's ~$5.25 CAD / month (if I signed up for two years). That being said I understand your point, assuming that they have that trust. As someone who isn't familiar with them though I need to first know why they deserve it more than others. Other people do seem to speak highly of them though and have made some points that are in their favour.
Check their reddit for all the threads with pictures of cities plastered in Mullvad billboards. Then you know why others are cheaper.
That would be unfortunate to see. Can you maybe link examples so others can judgr for themselves? I use their service and often recommend and confirming your statement is important to me so I can adjust my opinion.
What is wrong with them buying billboards?
I dont need part of my money going to advertisment campaigns
I can confirm I’ve seen their ads in person in multiple places in Los Angeles. North Hollywood had a billboard near the Noho gateway sign, and I think the red line? had a bunch of ads on the inside and outside of some of the trains a year or two ago.
Few good things:
Downside: No port forwarding, this I've remedied with headscale server and tailscale clients. Port forwarding is needed if u want to access your home network from outside
Basically, Mullvad has a great track record, seems to legitimately care about privacy rather than just making money.
As for your mention on protonvpn, the founder did say some weird stuff last year, but so far the company itself hasn’t demonstrated any questionable behavior in regards to data, so it’s still considered safe.
You can pay them in cash, for me this is a great feature
Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding does it?
I don't think it does but I don't care so far.
How important is port forwarding? I've never really bothered with it. I'm definitely still in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to using vpns.
Seeding torrents will be next to impossible without it, especially for private trackers. It's pretty vital for torrenting. Anything else, doesn't matter.
I used Mullvad for a year and love the service, but they explicitly don't allow port forwarding, so I recently switched to Proton. Their CEO's comments last year still feel disgusting and I trust them as a company far less than I trust Mullvad as a result, but the service they offer is stellar regardless.
From what I understand, Mullvad is the top choice for a privacy-focused daily driver VPN, while Proton is the best choice for torrenting while still functioning just fine for daily use.
I run a Minecraft server. Couldn't have done it without port forwarding.
https://lemmy.today/comment/17273349
The only realistic answer is “it depends”. Torrents require at least one side to have an open port. If your port isn’t open, you’ll only be able to connect to people who have opened theirs. If everyone had open ports, you wouldn’t need to worry about it. But the reality is that many people don’t bother with opening a port, so your connections will be limited.
The issue will be much more apparent on smaller/less popular torrents. With popular torrents and hundreds of seeders, chances are good that some people will have an open port. But your speeds may be limited, because you can only connect to a select few. Even worse, torrents may stall entirely if there are only a few seeders, (and none of them have open ports). It’s super frustrating looking at a torrent with 3 or 4 seeders, but seeing that it has stalled.
There are workarounds like pinholing, but those are bodges that require specific circumstances to work.
I haven't even looked at port forwarding. I think maybe some ISPs in some countries might block traffic this way but others will know better. Everything just works with Mullvad on Fedora with Qbittorrent, so I'm happy.
It’s nothing to do with what ISPs blocking traffic it’s about being able to seed
IIRC it's good to get faster downloads on BitTorrent, but I've never stumbled upon a torrent that was slow anyway.
It's more of an issue with torrent seeding. You need to be able to accept incoming connections to seed, so you need a VPN/router to allow incoming traffic to a certain port to reach your torrent client.
So, not a problem for leeching, but if you are trying to meet ratio requirements, could be a big problem.