alt Hacker News> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.
Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
Replies
Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"
One of its founders donated to a party that opposes immigration into Sweden. Some people seem to think that this is a conflict of interest because they assume that the surveillance necessary to accomplish what they think that political party wants to do (they claim they want to do mass forced deportations) is at odds with Mullvad's mission.
I personally don't think a single founder making that contribution is a strong enough tie to Mullvad to expect it to influence their behavior. I also don't think there's any reason to think that that party's goal will necessarily entail the curbing of digital security products like VPNs.
If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.
tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.
The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.