Anyone else getting bounced from mainstream websites with Mullvad VPN?
EDIT:
Thank you all for your help, I guess I'll have to keep changing location, filling captcha and occasionally allow an exception. Keeping ones internet activity even remotely private requires effort, even with good tools.
Hi,
After reading time and again about how Mullvad VPN is the best VPN out there, I decided to give it a try and got myself an account & credit for a month worth of trial.
However after a couple days of use on my mobile (I also use Mullvad Browser), I'm getting bounced from many mainstream website.
Don’t no which websites you are talking about, but a bunch of websites (looking at you Reddit) block VPNs based on ip. Your only option is changing server until you find one that isn’t blocked or using Tor
Life Hack: Replace the 'www' part from the URL with 'sh'.
For example: replace
www.reddit.com/post1/...
with
sh.reddit.com/post1/...
It should be easy to write a script that replaces these URLs.
This allows using reddit with my VPN (Mullvad) turned on. I don't know why reddit offers such a workaround, but it works for me.
In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.
I'm having the same issue, and like others have said, using frontends Is a nice solution. However, they can be hard up remember. I searched for an extension to automate it, and found this. Seems awesome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Yeah, libredirect is awesome. It's useful even if I remember all the frontends, since it means even embedded and linked videos use whatever frontend I want in the case of Youtube.
You'll find that with any major VPN. The IP addresses they use to proxy your traffic eventually get flagged and blocked by lots of major players. Which is why VPN companies cycle through them quite often. As others have said, you'll either need to switch servers (and thus ips) or figure out another path.
I don't use mull but most have a way to exclude a given url or site from the tunnel if you need it. i.e. the site will work for you but it's coming from your own IP and unencrypted.
Nope, pretty normal. You'll find that you'll need frontends and proxies for tons of things. For example Instagram hasn't ever worked for me with a VPN. I no longer have an account anyway,, but for the times someone sends me a link I've had to find sites that let you view the content without actually visiting Instagram. Same with reddit, reddit frontends are very good these days (I'd recommend any Redlib instance). Also, sometimes a specific VPN server is IP blocked and you can just connect to a different server to view a web site that blocked you initially. It is a fair amount of work, but honestly its helped me slow down my consumption of random bullshit anyway haha. I use ProtonVPN and pay for premium.
Interestingly, I use Instagram with Mullvad for over a year now, both app and web. Reddit seems to be working fine too. Maybe that's because I opened accounts without a VPN.