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
i was already using ente auth, i went straight back to bitwarden, and i was on the free tier the whole time on proton anyway
Obsidian is proprietary. It can go fuck itself.
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.
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.
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.
Tuta for mail
Mullvad for VPN
Logseq for notes
Keepass for passwords
Kraken is pretty good for wallets as far as I’m concerned (?)
Pretty funny to suggest anti-open-source Obsidian in a privacy subreddit
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.
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.
Yah for now keeping Proton Pass only for that reason. And still on Gmail because I’d tried thrice migrating all to Proton but something always annoyed me.
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.
Which file opener on iOS?
- 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.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.
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.
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)
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 :(
I’m tired
yeah…
I would maybe hold off on choosing Bitwarden. Around the time they raised their pricing they started getting venture capitalist money so the enshittification there may be coming. As far as alternatives, the only other one I’ve used besides Proton is KeePass which could be make or break depending on how you setup the vault, I’d probably save it in something pCloud so you aren’t screwed should something happen to your server, but YMMV.
Tuta for email perhaps?
I’ve been using KeePassXC with Syncthing for years and it’s been great as a password manager for myself. But I don’t need to share those credentials with anyone.
Same, plus a yubikey for 2FA
Aegis is my chosen 2FA. never have been convinced on hardware keys personally.
Fair enough. I like the ease of simply touching it. It’s less of a frustration for when my wife wants to access my password manager
I’m strongly considering getting a hardware key. Is Yubikey the best choice or are the other options also worth considering?
Solokey and Nitrokey are strong alternatives, and the two I’ve been recommended by people who would know.
Solokey is good if Fido is the only thing needed.
Nitrokey has Fido and more. I keep meaning to try the other features, but haven’t gotten around to it.
I bought my yubikey at least 7-8 years ago and then stopped keeping up on comparisons. I honestly have no idea which is the best, because there are varying use cases and standards available. Yubikey works for my use case and threat model, but I have no idea what would be best for yours. I wish I could be more specific for you but also don’t want to give you misleading info.
But I don’t need to share those credentials with anyone.
Yeah, I like BitWarden because it makes sharing passwords very easy. My wife and I have a few shared accounts, and have a family vault set up. So anything we want to share just gets transferred into the family vault, and we can both easily access it. And since it even supports TOTP, we can have those directly on the shared accounts without needing to bug each other with the “hey I’m trying to log into {x}, send me your Google Authenticator code” song and dance.
Does keepass have a reputable browser extension or is the application itself all that’s used? I think that’s what moved me off Keepass initially after using it for like six years and then moving to BitWarden a few years ago
I’m not sure what you mean by reputable, but I’ve been using the official KeePassXC extension.
I assume the point of the extension is to have support for autofill, if that is the case, you should be aware that it is generally a bad idea to give your browser access to that info directly since they are the definition of internet connected apps. What I do instead of autofill with keepassxc is open the vault and press the copy to clipboard buttons which works essentially the same way as autofill just with a couple more clicks.
When you use an extension for that task it also validades the URL, which helps to not type by accident your credentials in a fake website.
This actually saved me once when a Google result was literally a phishing version of GitHub.
I’ve tried that exact setup but Syncthing kept not detecting changes or creating conflicts… So I’m still stuck with Proton Pass :/ (it’s a good password manager, but Andy Yen is being too much of a loser)
Bitwarden is getting worse btw unless you’re running it yourself
