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
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’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 (?)
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.
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.
Pretty funny to suggest anti-open-source Obsidian ina privacy subreddit
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 :(
Windscribe has been good to me as a VPN.
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.
- don’t forget backups (standard advice for any storage but more so here)
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.
the client apps are still only supplied by Bitwarden
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?
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.
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.
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.
Dont know if they could kill compatibility for vaultwarden if they chose to.
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:
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.
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.Bitwarden is pivoting towards the same enshittification path as everything else
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.
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)
I’m tired
yeah…
Bitwarden is getting worse btw unless you’re running it yourself
I’m enjoying vacation totally out of the loop here, what Proton did? Fascism or fascism?
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.
