If you’re worried about slower speeds and higher ping you can split tunnel applications so they wont be affected by the VPN i do this for things like games and freetube(doesn’t seem to work with my vpn enabled).

The only VPN I use is:

Wireguard and OpenVPN to connect to my home network.

AirVPN for a server that I may or may not have on my home network that may or may not be sailing the high seas (allegedly).

absolutely crucial. All my devices are always connected through a VPN, and usually I try to route my traffic through a different country. When your country is paying for a service to monitor citizen’s internet traffic, anonymity is worth paying for.

Super duper important. I won’t run my network without one. So if we ever get to a point where a VPN is prohibited by law, I will unplug and go work on some of my other hobbies like creating bonsai. Any no, I don’t run the 'arr stack, I’m not a hacker, nor do I torrent. I just prefer the absolute minimum number of people knowing who I am or what I’m doing. I’m that way irl.

sometimes slower speed.

Indeed, anything you put between you and your target will slow speeds, especially if you’re running everything through a double hop Shadowsocks proxy. That is the trade off. All technology wields a double edged sword. Additionally, you will encounter more captcha than normal, tho 99% of what I see are Cloudflare verification. Again, yet another trade off. You might even be precluded from accessing some websites. Me personally, I’ll accept the captcha/verification, slower speeds, and occasional site blocks, for security, privacy and anonymity. Also, in regards to sites blocking a VPN ip, it’s not a common occurrence on my network, but when it does happen, I find that the information contained on the blocked site, is freely available somewhere else.

I don’t think most ppl need a vpn for at home stuff but I do use Mullvad since I spend a lot of time on college WiFi and they might not like how I access my textbooks and research papers.

Not using VPN - tried it, didn’t gain anything from it…

Vital. I host my own VPN so I can have a dedicated IP which is firewall whitelisted to all my provisions to access Ssh and self hosted app ports.

Very important, and becoming more important by the day as more and more regions agegate the internet. You need to change regions so you can access sites without guaranteed identity theft.

If you don’t use one, it’s fairly trivial to link your activity across the internet, as well as trace any internet traffic back to you, personally.

Connectivity is certainly a problem. For the most part, if they block my access, then I consider them not worth visiting.

I use Mullvad daily. Never turn it off.

10/10

If you’ve never lived in a place where you complain about having speeds being throttled, then 2 guys come to your house with a full color printout of your internet use over the last few months, then walk around looking at everything you have and basically asking for a bribe just becaise, then you haven’t fully understood the use case “masking traffic from your ISP.”

I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).

A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.

When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.

I use

• ProtonVPN mostly to bypass geoblocking or when specific Torrent trackers demand VPNs
• WireGuard self-hosted mostly to reach own devices outside my LAN
• TailScale also for self-hosting access but I pretty much migrated everything to WG
• ssh tunneling (arguably not VPN but still convenient)

I also use split tunneling, inclusive (e.g. everything but Firefox) or exclusive (e.g. only qbittorrent) whenever I don’t want to tunnel all my traffic.

Over the past few years, there has been a great increase in websites using geoblocking. Half the local news sites in the USA block traffic from the EU for example, likely because they want to inject 300 advertising trackers in a manner that would violate EU law. I’ve been using Mullvad for years, and I am happy with it.

Sometimes lemmy.world blocks me from posting from it, which I am not happy with. They were even critical of its strict privacy stance, which I found to be a weird take from a fediverse project.

Very happy with mullvad VPN ,use it mostly for accessing annas archive with is blocked in my country ,thanks to cloudflare

I connect to my home network via VPN if I’m out and about. There’s no additional cost, but I feel more secure in a public wifi and have access to all my internal services as I’m used to.