I Bit The Bullet and Finally Tried Proton VPN

Whoops, this has been ignored for 2 months straight, may as well finally start fleshing it out properly. In case you're wondering about why it's listed as 2 months old, I wrote an initial very brief draft, kept it set to "diary", and never revisited it... oops.

So. At the end of July of this year, the UK Online Safety Act was enforced, requiring essentially all social medias (other online communication sites got dragged into this as well) to include some form of age verification system in order to access certain types of content. And the way they went about it? Either extensively scanning your face to determine your age, or comparing a photo of you to a picture of your real-life ID documents. Now, because SpaceHey naturally doesn't have the capabilities (or the will, for that matter) to do that kind of thing, it is now blocked throughout the entirety of the UK... which includes me.

Now, despite the fact that I don't actually comment or post all that much on here, I like this place. I want to stick around and style my profile and make friends and stay far, far away from the endless scroll of all the social media sites I've since left in the dust (think Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, X, Discord). But how would I go about doing that, seeing that I can't access SpaceHey normally without going to another country entirely?

You already know the answer. I need a VPN.

I've seen plenty of ads for NordVPN, but I don't know... I avoid buying products because of sponsorships, they're paid and most likely gloss over the negatives. In the end, I did some digging, and stumbled across Proton, a freemium digital utility company (if that's what you'd call that kind of thing). Now Proton doesn't just offer a VPN, it does have a plethora of other things to offer such as email and password saving, and they're based in Switzerland, a country with very strict privacy rules. They also have a "no-logs" policy (they don't track what you do or for how long or keep IP logs), which was successfully audited last month. I decided to go with this company in the end. I also came across Mullvad, but their VPN is so private that it can be slow at times, and is probably a pain with casual internet browsing... and I want the silly fonts. If it weren't for the silly fonts, I'd probably be using Tor by now.

I could talk about the email aspect of Proton, since I've been making use of that a lot, but I just want to stick to the VPN, so here's a couple of points for it (which you will need to make a Proton account, regardless of whether you choose to use the email services or not):

1. You only get 500MB of storage right off the bat, with it increasing to 1GB if you complete the "tutorial"
2. Email E2EE if the sender and recipient both use Proton, kind of useless otherwise.
3. Blocks built-in trackers that record when you open an email and what you do with it.
4. Offers 10 free email aliases to mask your true email address, of which I am using roughly 5.
5. Sometimes not recognised as a valid email provider by some companies (oh and good luck with the email aliases, if you're on the free tier like me then the alias will look something like "purpose.randomword12345@passinbox.com").

Now, onto the actual VPN itself. As a free user, you get unlimited data usage (from my experience at least), with the restriction of being confined to the fastest server out of a list of 7 free ones. When I first joined, I believe the extent of the list was 5, but two more were added somewhere down the line (I believe the new servers are based in Singapore and Thailand). In my use case, this is perfectly fine, as all I need in order to access SpaceHey is a connection from a non-UK country, and the closest free Proton VPN server to the UK is in the Netherlands. However, for people trying to see country-specific websites, such as maybe Rai in Italy, then you will need to cough up money for a subscription. Thankfully Proton allows you to subscribe for just one feature (in this case, the VPN) instead of getting Proton Unlimited, where you would pay more to gain all the benefits across all of Proton's products.

In terms of connection, things do load a little more slowly than usual... but this is a VPN, what do you expect? It's never suddenly cut out on me, and I've only been unable to connect to the service once, so I'm going to assume that's the case whenever I'm asleep as well and say that overall, Proton VPN is quite stable in that regard. Sometimes things load a little more slowly than usual, so do keep that in mind. I have been able to watch YouTube videos without much problem while using it, though, so unless if it's a really intensive thing or a huge download then you should be good for just casual use.

Edit: just remembered that if Proton VPN asks for you to update it, I wouldn't click the "update" button and call it a day, it seems to cause the VPN to stop working. Uninstall and reinstall should do the trick.

Holy yappatron, this is getting long, thank goodness I don't have anything else to say.

TL:DR; Give Proton VPN a try if you're looking for a free product, and you don't want to connect to a specific country. If you don't mind paying a subscription, check out Proton anyway! If you're not willing to give them your credit card information, bear in mind they accept cash sent in an envelope.

P.S. Club Penguin turns 20 today. Waddle on, chaps.