They seem to be on the inertia as a strategy train. Most users won't have heard about this so they're not in danger of losing them. A few who have won't abandon ship because it's a pain. And the rest they seem to tolerate losing. That's unfortunate, say I who isn't even their customer. I would have thought they do more but maybe another two weeks of ended subscriptions can lead them to reason and get rid of Daniel.

I like mullvad and will continue to use them, but this was a terrible response. ÖrP is such a strange party. It's nationalistic, but also Marxist, somehow. I haven't read all their policies, but I dislike their immigration policy, and the way they act generally. They're loud and provocational.

What is a good alternative to Mullvad? My subscription just ended yesterday.

They try to distance themselves from it as much as they can, but at the end of the day he is using money he obtained from Mullvad (us) in ways some people don't like.

The only true way to stop it is for the CEO to leave the company and sell all shares and stakes...

Or to simply stop giving Mullvad money, which is what I've done. There are plenty other privacy focused vpns that don't have this issue.

even if you do believe in freedom of expression and information, why would you donate to a fascist group which have been using suppression of expression - either it is attacking immigrants, pushing age gate laws, or attacking trans rights - as their path to power?

I have no problem, if the service gets used for things I don't agree with (I will not know anyway). But I do have a problem when one of the founders I paid (with the money from my subscription) openly supports this kind of party. No hard feelings, but with that knowledge, I prefer to give my money to another VPN.

Got my refund from Mullvad so I'm fine now.

Windscribe

The Hated One has a video explaining his take on what Mullvad has done, and he gives 2 good alternatives to Mullvad. He also has other videos comparing VPN services in terms of privacy. He's very thorough.

Are they trying to disrtance themselves, though?

Mullvad does not condone it, nor condemn it. It most likely was a bad idea; most things where there are a multitude of conflicting opinions necessarily are. But societies need a great diversity of ideas, initiatives and organizations who can be tested and sifted until the best ones remain.

The "Marxist" bit for ÖrP is like "Marx said that under capitalism wokers are alienatied cogs in a machine therefore we should have full control over the reproduction of none pure swedes, through mandatory birth control, so thay we can churn out cogs to the swedish industrial machine, just like Marx said". That is the type of "Marxism" they talk about in their pod.

What a weak statement. Not one mention of how the donation most likely came (in part) from customer funds.

Here's the statement from Mullvad's co-founder himself, which at least has some substance on the why: https://dberntsson.info/2026/07/20/orebropartiet/

There is no stance that Mullvad can take on this in order to make me want to stay with them, since this is not an abstract, philosophical matter. It's simple: Daniel partially owns a pro profit company. I pay Daniel's company some money. Daniel reaps - as he should - parts of the company's revenue as wage (which is my money). Daniel uses that wage to fund whatever the hell he wants - as he should - with my money. I'm either fine with contributing to this or not. Period. I am not fine with it, so I'm flirting with IVPN.

iVPN

If you want something European, I'd throw AirVPN in the mix. I went there and never to Mullvad. And now I'm glad I didn't and at the same time I'm looking forward to hearing inevitably what corpses my current provider has in the cupboard.

I dislike Proton, which I quit after the CEO praised 47 on his big tech regulation and before they handed the email account of some environmental activist over to the authorities, in France IIRC. They want to be your replacement for Google and keep pushing more services at obscure subscription levels at you. In terms of VPN, they were good though.

I think they're severely underestimating how valuable the recommendation of techies/word of mouth effect is to their business...

What vpn to migrate to?
Proton trys to be Google 2.0 and centralize,
The ones from the adverts (nord, tunnelbear, surfshark) dont protect your privacy and are therefore useless...

Anyone with more tech knowledge got a recommendation fro maximum privacy and decent enough speed and ping for hd videos and casual gaming?

What VPN would you recommend which outs privacy first but also has good enough speed and ping to use as daily driver for HD videos and casual gaming?

Having the correct class analysis but trying to keep the system just split the classes by ethnicity instead of overthrowing it is exactly what the Nazis proposed...

Love that guy, but that's the only source I have which at least feels objective, but one source, especially a YouTube video, isn't enough. Someone got like scientific/investigative data on this?

I use AirVpn. Seems good (no logs, etc) and they allow payment via bitcoin.

I moved to them as they allow port forwarding when many others were dropping the option

They really don't get it, it is very disappointing, but they deserve to fail now.
99% of the VPN industry is dodgy, mullvad now included.

Time will tell, the industry is based on paid 'reviews', and manipulation. There is little reason for any of them to pretend to be ethical, the biggest companies definitely aren't.
Mullvad are likely to feel this though, since they most likely have a more ethical user base than the competition.
Airvpn and ivpn are no doubt gaining new customers.

Airvpn and ivpn are the only ones that cone across as ethical to me now. No idea re: details since I have not used either of them (yet).

There are definitely not plenty of them.

Which 2 did he recommend?

https://nym.com/

https://safing.io/spn/

https://www.ivpn.net/en/

https://torproject.org

I would be wary of the claims of any company implementing a mixnet as part of their VPN. The anonymity that Tor provides depends on the basic principle that is is unlikely that your exit node and entry node will be able to collaborate. If all nodes in the network are run by one company then that basic assumption is broken from the start.

I'm going with Nym when my Mullvad sub is up. If I can get a refund from Mullvad without KYCing myself, I'll do so earlier.

Nym runs your traffic through 5 nodes or 2 nodes (a nixnet) depending on user selected setting. Node operators are paid in crypto based on the number of packets they handle. The CEO is an anarchist and expects to be in prison at some point. Nym is designed to continue running even if all the higher ups are in prison.

I'm not a customer, just got all this from an interview with the CEO on with TheHatedOne.

Edit: This is the interview I mentioned https://www.bitchute.com/video/uoyDTW2nxWk

Thought experiment time…

part of the company’s revenue as wage

How far down the chain does that count for you? If there was a VP, Manager, or Individual Contributor that took their (personal) wages and donated to a cause you didn’t like, would you still pull your money?

I have had a Mullvad account for many years. I now have an iVPN acc. It's a very simple choice for me. If Mullvad's success results in funding far right racists then I don't care to assist that happening

Do you have any information where I can read more about this? I don't want to listen to their podcast.

https://expo.se/ is probably a good start. You can look for Markus Allard, the head of that party. He shares a podcast with Malcom Kyeyene. For example their article here, Swedish, talks about the close connections between these circles (albeit Allard and ÖbP is not the focus there) and white nationalism https://expo.se/fordjupning/det-varas-for-rod-nationalism/

FUCK Mullvad now. Damn it

Good question! I guess it does matter that he's a cofounder and CEO. I honestly don't know how I would react if we were talking about an employee instead. I'd deliberate and make up my mind there and then. Which sheds light on the fact that the matter isn't as black and white as my comment made it sound.

It was something I didn’t have a good answer for either. I think ownership is a good criteria but then I was trying to figure out why it was to me. Since it’s passed to an individual, via salary, is it still “my money”?

Amount could have something to do, but it’s possible for a highly paid IC to donate quite a bit.

The one that is cut-and-dry for me is something like Chic-Fil-A. My money is going directly to their foundation, which is used against LGBTQ people, so that’s an immediate hard no.

He is providing that political party with over half of its income if I recall correctly.

If Mullvad’s janitor were someone doing that and Mullvad refused to terminate them, I’d quit Mullvad.

Very reasonable stance.

My point was that their user base is more technologically adept than other businesses, and therefore it matters more for them.
Also their selling point is that you "trust" them not to give your info away, and anything that makes them seem untrustworthy is bound to hurt their business. So they're not really comparable to regular businesses when it comes to that.

Technically Mullvad didn't fund them, it was there CEO who did it partially with money he got from working at Mullvad.

Given that Mullvad is the gold standard for ACTUAL privacy, can be paid with cash or crypto, has no user accounts and has been actually tested by law enforcement and they got fuck all.

What is the alternative? Privacy first VPN, not “I wanna watch Japanese Netflix” VPN.

Given that I avoid services that require subscription, Mullvad had been off my list for years already, but this is just sad to hear. And even more now that the best are proven to be Nazis by act or by association, so I prefer to just keep using Proton's free tier for the time being and being more a hindrance than a money source for them as possible.

they had "free" services like DNS and a decent browser.

i'm using quad9 now.

Thx for the suggestion, I have seen this, the hated one is my only good source on this topic, but more than one source would be nice.

The anarchist story was one of those which sounded almost to good to be true in my ears

Airvpn - great track record, been around forever

But societies need a great diversity of ideas, initiatives and organizations who can be tested and sifted until the best ones remain.

need? At what point does a society NEED to test racism to see if it should remain?

When will these societies decide that they tested it long enough?

Icevpn has been great for me.

How’s I been treating you?

I’m currently on my first month of IVPN and I’ve had a better experience with Netflix’s regional restrictions. With Mullvad, Netflix eventually is able to catch up when I switch locations, and they block the content I want to see. IVPN is able to evade that, at least for now based on my experience.

EDIT: Never mind, I misread your comment and thought you were asking about evading streaming regional restrictions specifically. lol

But yes, IVPN is a good alternative and recommended in privacyguides.

wat

I am once again posting a reply to help users of lemmy understand that there is no alternative to mullvad unless you can accept a lower privacy, anonymity and security standard of service.

That doesn’t mean if you leave mullvad you will be harmed, only that you will be losing safety margin.

Your decisions are your own: you may know better than me, you may be willing to suffer for your principles, you may believe your actions in the marketplace will have a tangible effect on the world but if you read this you can hopefully make those decisions yourself with clear eyes and understanding.

Ivpn, how’s it working out?