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
If you are on iOS I recommend KeeForge as there are no payments aside from donations and it supports KeePassXC and KBDX formats
Obsidian is proprietary. It can go fuck itself.
I’m tired
yeah…
Bitwarden’s gone private equity. I’d hold off on switching to them; maybe try to live with KeePass if you’re not on a family plan.
I switched over to vaultwarden. I am stuck on an iPhone for the time being and I don’t care for all the Keepass ios apps.
Completely valid. I myself am still on Bitwarden, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my family is already entrenched in it.
I think if I have to move them again, I might seriously consider forking keepass, adding the features I use in bitwarden.
I do not look forward to dealing with IOS tho.
Vaultwarden is completely Bitwarden-compatible. You can export all data from Bitwarden server/service, import it into Vaultwarden server, and your family will not notice the change at all, except you’ll ask them to change address in their already installed Bitwarden app.
They don’t need to change anything else. To them, it will still be the same Bitwarden.
and your family will not notice the change at all
Here lie dragons: for as long as the private equity firm that owns Bitwarden chooses to let us use their clients.
There are non-Bitwarden Android clients around, but they lack Chrome extensions and IOS.
True, this is a possibility. But, in years of Vaultwarden’s existence, this never happened.
100% but for years of Vaultwarden’s existence, they haven’t been owned by private equity.
Just keep your eyes open and know that it could come for us. I’ve stopped counting on how many services went private->enshitify bad enough for me to bail.
Fair enough. In case we do need to move, here’s a quick tip: KeepassXC and many other password managers are able to read Bitwarden export files, so you can seamlessly move credentials there, should the need arise.
Also, Vaultwarden has a web interface, which can do as a temporary or full substitute. I used it for a while, it’s totally doable.
there’s still vaultwarden. i just self-host that and use the official bitwarden clients (android app + firefox extension). even if bitwarden itself shits the bed and takes their clients down with it, i don’t doubt there will be alternatives up and running relatively quick.
I would switch to KeePass if its sync method was more sane than “big binary file + Syncthing”, it seems like all the password manager options kindof suck in some way
aughhh dealing with syncthing and keepass was a painnnnnn. it was way too easy for things to desync. i just switched to my own vaultwarden instance and called it a day.
Yeah, there are a bunch of ways to tackle that. Chunk-Based Content-Addressable Block Storage (that weird thing where they put a folder of 0-A the folders under that with hex-based naming and small chunks of data wouldn’t be horrible keeping update sizes managable. The real problem there is dealing with Syncthing conflict files. The monobinary is either new or old. Maybe a local-only CBC with deltas delivered by syncthing so they can overwrite each other and a rollback/history option.
P2P anything is complicated. Something as damning and imporant as password management makes it so much worse.
Pretty funny to suggest anti-open-source Obsidian ina privacy subreddit
Bitwarden is getting worse btw unless you’re running it yourself
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.
Have people stopped trying Mullvad VPN for some reason? Is it no longer the best privacy focused one?
There was some drama after one of Mullvad’s cofounders was outed for donating considerable sums of money to right wing organizations. It’s fallen out of favour as the default recommendation as a result
Ah, I had no idea. Are any of the others anywhere near as private and secure?
I’m not sure. Mullvad is still a good product, but what it funds is not.
If I’m entirely honest, I mostly see VPN services as a predatory market, inflated by their own marketing campaigns about the risk of personal privacy. There are some products who are true to their word, like Mullvad, but most are looking for a quick buck from the average user who might forget they have a running subscription if they keep the cost low enough.
Frankly, after seeing what’s happened with Proton and Mullvad, I’m not inclined to believe anyone in this market amounts to more than a paranoid libertarian at best.
I switched from Mullvad to IVPN, no complaints
Closest I’ve found to it, so far, is Windscribe
If you’re gonna downvote, could someone at least tell me why Windscribe isn’t a good replacement? I’m not claiming to be an authority on the subject
One of the owners made a huge donation to a right-wing, anti-immigration Swedish political party, I believe. Someone feel free to correct me on the details.
I’ve been looking at both ivpn and airvpn as potential replacements.
Is there any free good email service other than Tuta?
All pricing are too high for people with average wage of my country.
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.
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 :(
Tuta for email perhaps?
For meet, I just generate a Signal meet link and share with people.
Instead of bitwarden, I use KeePass with Syncthing.
Instead of Lumo(the app was terribly slow), you can use ddg ai, on fdroid there is a 1mb webview container application of ddg ai specifically so if you dont want to use ddg browser, yoi can use that for their ai.
For 2fa, i use stratumauth.
I need a vpn alternative too.
I’m enjoying vacation totally out of the loop here, what Proton did? Fascism or fascism?
people better get familiar with docker
Mind giving a bit of a breakdown of why? I’m new to Linux and heard a lot about docker (I think its like separate boxes for an apps?) after I switched and it just seemed too much at the time so I’ve put it on the back burner (was stotally new to terminal stuff).
I’m about to try rigging up an old laptop for self hosting and trying to learn. Was thinking of figuring out docker first before trying immich, keepass, calendar with calDAV and it’s all pretty overwhelming lol.
Running apps directly on Linux is like cooking in a shared kitchen where everyone shares the same spice rack. If one app needs an updated spice that breaks the recipe, your whole kitchen suffers.
Docker is like giving every app its own private kitchen pod with all its exact ingredients pre-packaged inside. Nothing leaks out, nothing interferes with the rest of your system, and if an app breaks, you just throw the whole pod away and start fresh without touching your main computer.
Once you get used to docker, you can stand up 20 apps in a night with standard configs and it all just works.
Later on, if you start really homelabbing it, you can stand up 3 small computers and cluster them to keep a copy of each container you’re using up. If one of the boxes go down, they just shuffle and start the container on other nodes.
Agreed on all of this. I run docker on one of my PCs and have multiple containers running. But I didn’t know you can cluster multiple PCs to run a copy of the containers and I was just wondering about a week ago if that’s possible. Would you have a resource on how to set up a 2nd PC to do this and cluster with my server?
You need docker swarm for that, it’s pretty easy to setup and it works as an extension to docker.
If you selfhist eg. DNS, or another static app that you want highly available but from a single IP, you can use keepalived directly on the host and this allows you to have two machines that share a third virtual IP, and if server A fails, the IP moves automatically to Server B and you don’t even notice that the server failed, because everything failed over to the other server.
Awesome, I will be looking into setting this up tonight. Thanks for the info.
I don’t have a known good resource, but you should look into K3S. https://docs.k3s.io/
The documentation is very dense, I fear. I would probably go hit youtube search for “k3s cluster” and find a beginner that doesn’t annoy you too badly.
The general path you’ll have to do is:
Translate Configuration: Convert your docker-compose.yml settings into Kubernetes YAML manifests
Install k3s
Map Storage and Secrets. Replace local Docker volumes with PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) and .env files with Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps.
Deploy and Verify: Apply your manifests using kubectl apply and verify routing through the built-in Traefik ingress.
Then you can install and add a new node.
depending on how you set it up, it’ll move the containers around for you automatically.
Note: all your k3s nodes need to be very close network wise. you can dump one at a friends house and make a cool geo-diverse setup, they need REALLY low latency
Whew, OK that’s more involved than I thought it would be. I will try to find time on the weekend to mess with it. Thanks for the info.
i’d install k3s on the two boxes and just stand up a super simple container that doesn’t need storage, think ntfy or something of the like, you can do that quick. getting shared storage up is a but more difficult :)
OK, I will give that a try for now. Sounds a little quicker. Then when I have more time I can go the other route you mentioned. Thanks again.
First, this makes more sense, thanks for the write up. Second, I really wish I knew this stuff when I went head first into fuck Microsoft mode (I have a feeling I’m gonna be resetting my main PC at some point to do it right, and really dreading that). I have an old laptop returning to me that I’m gonna throw Nix on and fuck with it.
A piece of advice from someone who’s 3 years on Linux and still finds Docker a mess:
Try Proxmox. It’s a Debian-based server OS that is all about containers and virtual machines. It uses LXC containers and manages them in the same way you would treat a normal Linux install.
The interface may look a bit scary at first, but I promise this will be the only thing that scares you in the whole experience and it will take just a day or two to get used to it. I suggest finding simple “getting started” guides that will quickly get you up to speed. It’s easy, it just has too many buttons on the screen at once. Oh, and yeah - it’s fully graphical. No CLI unless you specifically want to.
After you figure out the interface, you’ll get an ultimate server solution - or an ultimate playground. Wanna test that thing? Spin up a container/VM. Screwed something up real bad? Destroy the container and get a new one. It takes two clicks, and you’re up and running again. You can easily back up your containers and VMs, so if you screw something up when actually hosting something useful, you can easily revert.
For every program you self-host, you can make its own container - they add very little overhead - and never think of it again. Should anything ever happen to a program - consequences will be limited to that program only.
Oh, and if you DO want to mess with Docker? Make a VM and play with Docker there to your heart’s content. Everything got borked? Throw that VM out the window and spin up a new one. Proxmox makes it very easy.
Well I don’t know much on docker myself. I use it for selfhosting containerized server stuff on local network only. Since Flatpak apps are sandboxed already (only install verified ones and intall Flatseal).
You can mimick a lot of cloud services with docker containers, that’s why I mentioned it. It’s the surest way to have control over your data. Don’t forget to make it rootless after installing.
Best you can do is get on with it at your pace, treat it like a fun hobby, try stuff, break stuff, read documentation, look at examples and learn.
Also regarding using a laptop as a server, don’t forget to remove the battery. Still running it 24/7 might chew a bit on your electricity bill. ARM devices are more beneficial here.
Don’t forget to make it rootless
Or, alternatively, use Podman. It is Docker-compatible and doesn’t need root at all, even where Docker does.
ARM devices are more beneficial here
For power consumption - undoubtedly yes. For native app support - no. I think an x86 system is a very reasonable starting point, removing as much friction as possible.
Just wait till a maintainer of a popular repo says something out of pocket and all of a sudden the community is fragmented.
Voting with your feet is the BEST thing about it. If a maintainer starts being a bag of dicks, the other people on the project will walk and take a copy of the ball with them.
We’ve gotten a LOT of great software because someone holding a project back was being unreasonable.
