That announcement was the biggest eye-roller all week.

It’s just not fun anymore, covid really killed the vibe. And the fact that they cut tax incentives for foreigners doesn’t help with that.

Proton Desktop is not linked to your phone in any way, so enabling stealth there doesn’t have any impact on your device unfortunately.

Interesting to hear about Mullvad, maybe they did change the protocol around! My backup had always been Windscribe, they give you 10 GB traffic for free, but the reliability in China went downhill over the last year.

But my days are numbered now anyway, will be out end of July, and still got Astrill prepaid until November or so, so not going to experiment too much now.

You need to go to settings and under protocol select stealth. The other connection types are blocked in China.

Mullvad doesn’t work here at all.

The most widespread one is Astrill, though it’s quite pricey. Used to be the only one that works consistently; but Proton is a decent alternative.

I’m not familiar with it, but proton has a free plan where you can’t choose servers yourself but are assigned one at random. If all you care for is browsing protection and not bypassing geoblocked content or torrenting, that’s all you need really. And they are very trusted.

Why not use Firefox Relay? It’s a mail forwarding service with 5 aliases in the free version, and unlimited in paid. I’m using that in combination with my gmail account and it works beautifully.

If you only occasionally need a vpn, the free tier in proton is probably sufficient (but you can’t select servers, they will be assigned at random), and you could use windscribe as a backup (you can select servers in the free tier yourself, but traffic is limited to 10GB per 30 days).

I have yet to see a single Threads post in my timeline, or a comment from anyone. And I deliberately chose an instance that does not defederate from anyone.

Has been the norm in most Asian countries for well over a decade.