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Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton's trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.

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  • It's as if with each passing day, Proton wakes up and chooses to wear a slightly different red flag for a cape than the one they wore yesterday. I'm obviously being hyperbolic here, but I'm also a bit upset with myself for having decided to get an annual subscription with them last November.

    I've heard good things about Mullvad for VPN and Tuta for mail. I've got my own domain that I can start using with whatever mail host I land on.

    I'm in the U.S. What other mail providers are people using, and what other VPN providers should I be considering?

    • If you ever want to torrent, some service that allows port forwarding, like AirVPN or PureVPN. A popular alternative of mullvad does not allow this.

      • You keep posting this and I haven't been using port forwarding at all but torrents keep coming through. What am I missing here? Serious question, because I do not know what I'm either doing wrong or missing out on with port forwarding and I have not been experiencing what I would call a degraded experience as far as I can tell, but there's a whole world of things that I'm entirely ignorant to.

        • A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.

          So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.

          As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn't work.

          • Thanks, this is a little difficult to parse while I'm looking at my seeds uploading at ratios well over 1.00 but just the same I'm running a new VPN tunnel with port forwarding enabled to see what difference it makes.

            Plex works for the people I share with outside my network. No port forwarding. I just don't get what I am not getting, and every explainer I get is basically what you posted (no offense) and it doesn't match what my experience is showing me.

            • Here is it illustrated by multiple examples:

              • Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
                • Another person with ports closed wants to get the torrent. They will never be able to get it since you two can't establish a connection.
                • Another person with an open port wants to get the torrent. Eventually, after some delay, your client connects to the tracker and gets a list of people who want to get the torrent (leechers). You get the IP and port of the person who wants to get the torrent, you connect to them, you start uploading to them.
              • Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, but have ports open
                • No matter if a leecher has ports closed or open, they get your IP+Port from the tracker, connect to you, and you upload to them

              The situation with more clients is more nuanced, but essentially the same:

              • Situation: There are 5 seeders with open ports seeding a torrent
                • Everything works perfectly all the time
              • Situation: There are 5 seeders with closed ports seeding a torrent
                • For a leecher with open port, everything works perfectly
                • For a leecher with closed port, they will never get the torrent ever
              • Situation: There are 5 seeders seeding a torrent. 4 have their ports closed, 1 has it open.
                • 10 leechers with ports closed want to get the torrent. The only one that can upload to them is the 1 seeder with port open, the other 4 seeders are useless.
                • 10 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent. All 5 seeders seed their torrent equally and everything works perfectly.
                • 5 leechers with ports closed and 5 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent.
                  • The 5 leechers with ports closed are only serviced by the 1 seeder with port open
                  • The 5 leechers with port open get the torrent from all 5 seeders.
                  • The 1 seeder with open port seeds to every leecher, the protocol doesn't discriminate. So in a perfectly equal world, the 1 seeder with port open seeds to all 10 leechers, so each leecher gets 1/10th of their upload speed.
                  • The 4 seeders with closed port only seed to the 5 leechers with open port, giving each of them 1/5th of their upload speed.
                  • This means that, if you add this all up, the 5 leechers with closed ports get 1/10th (1 seeder times 1/10th) of one seeders' full upload speed, while the leechers with open ports get 9/10ths (1 seeder times 1/10th and 4 seeders times 2/10ths) of one seeders' full upload speed.

              as you can see, the people with open ports have a massive speed advantage in this example, literally getting 9 times the upload speed available in the network. But essentially, torrenting still works as long as some people have open ports, just everyone with closed ports is at a severe disadvantage.

              Now there are a couple more issues with closed ports (like DHT/pex not working) but they all boil down to the same problem: the ones with closed ports can only get stuff from people with open ports. Thus they are at a massive disadvantage and get reduced speeds or in contrived situations with few seeders even nothing.

        • I think port forwarding is more important for seeding when it comes to torrents. Someone has to be able to initiate the connection.

      • I just wanted to follow back up on this helpful comment here and the ones along with it from other posters. After testing and review, combined with what folks explained below, I can say for sure I'm looking for a service with port forwarding. And now I understand how someone could unknowingly offload the port forwarding responsibility to other parties thereby making torrents less accessible than may have been intended while mistakenly being under the impression they were providing equitable accessibility just because "it looks like it's working".

        I feel like this should have been more obvious way sooner, but my skull is remarkably thick it seems. Thanks for helping me wrinkle my brain a little more today.

    • I've used Mullvad VPN for almost a year and it's amazing. I only switched to Proton because I use all their services.

194 评论