Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton's trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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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:
The situation with more clients is more nuanced, but essentially the same:
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.
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.