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I'm losing energy for my VPN by the day (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by oneser@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@programming.dev

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I turned it off for 3 days and the difference was very noticeable.

No spending 2-3 minutes switching between servers to make a website work, no captchas before reading, no false "connection timed out" or "server blocked" notices.

Is everyone having the same experience, or am I doing something wrong?

*Oh but to add, any ads which slipped through unlock ended up being obviously better targeted, which I was repulsed by :)

*Edit: it looks like turning off Firefox's own DNS resolver managed to subside many of the captcha request, including for apps which are just browser overlays. Thanks @hansolo@lemmy.today :)

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[–] bignose@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Another downside of self-hosted VPN is you only have those exit nodes you can afford to pay for.

Established commercial VPN services typically have their hundreds of exit nodes in dozens of countries, all included in what I pay, and allow very easy switching between those at will. I couldn't afford to run that many exit nodes nor keep on switching to new ones as the old ones get blocked.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yep. Selfhosted VPN is for privacy from surveillance capitalism and "dragnet" government searches (which corporate/paid VPNs are IMO not effective against)

My 1 node is still way more expensive than a VPN package and does not provide location switching nor plausible deniability via mixing with other traffic (the latter is what Tor and related mixnets are for)

IMO location switching is the sole benefit of paid VPNs.

Worth noting: neither selfhost nor corporate VPNs are effective defenses against targeted government surveillance. Arguably, nothing is.