Not using VPN - tried it, didn't gain anything from it...

Very happy with mullvad VPN ,use it mostly for accessing annas archive with is blocked in my country ,thanks to cloudflare

I connect to my home network via VPN if I'm out and about. There's no additional cost, but I feel more secure in a public wifi and have access to all my internal services as I'm used to.

I use Mullvad daily. Never turn it off.

VPN's are like a condom for the internet. With much of the internet trying to fuck you putting on a wrapper is probably a good idea.

Eventually you get used to the slower speeds, rarely have issues with connection and if I do I just change IP. If a website doesn't allow a vpn I really don't need to go there and for the sites that I do want to visit there are optional different front ends I use.

A vpn and a good add blocker is pretty much a necessity for me at this point.

it all depends what you do, the average person honestly does not need a VPN, is it still "nice"? sure, getting over streaming restrictions or getting cheaper flights, and if you desire to sail the seas to any degree than also yeah get a VPN, and ofc, getting over porn bans

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.

Very important, and becoming more important by the day as more and more regions agegate the internet. You need to change regions so you can access sites without guaranteed identity theft.

If you don't use one, it's fairly trivial to link your activity across the internet, as well as trace any internet traffic back to you, personally.

Connectivity is certainly a problem. For the most part, if they block my access, then I consider them not worth visiting.

I have 2 that I use regularly. PIA to unblock things on the internet (and change how things are logged) and Tailscale to access my home network remotely. I'm happy with both of them.

10/10

If you've never lived in a place where you complain about having speeds being throttled, then 2 guys come to your house with a full color printout of your internet use over the last few months, then walk around looking at everything you have and basically asking for a bribe just becaise, then you haven't fully understood the use case "masking traffic from your ISP."

Australia is prepping for that social media ban in December (and maybe the UK porn ban too). Have 'been in' New Zealand ever since that news came out

I use

• ProtonVPN mostly to bypass geoblocking or when specific Torrent trackers demand VPNs
• WireGuard self-hosted mostly to reach own devices outside my LAN
• TailScale also for self-hosting access but I pretty much migrated everything to WG
• ssh tunneling (arguably not VPN but still convenient)

I also use split tunneling, inclusive (e.g. everything but Firefox) or exclusive (e.g. only qbittorrent) whenever I don't want to tunnel all my traffic.

I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).

A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.

When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.

~~If I didn't torrent, I likely wouldn't use a vpn. With https sites, my isp can't really see what I'm up to and my ip is never my actual location.~~

I can't get Freetube to work so I've been downloading youtube videos with PipePipe on my phone and watching them on my laptop. No way could I do this without a vpn.

Using Proton right now, it's ok (kind of lacking some features on Linux). Planning on switching to Mullvad before next summer.

I’ve been using PIA since 2015, and I’ve never really had any issues with it, it does what I need it to do and it only costs $40 a year.