Note: For transparency, I’ve also posted a similar thread on the Techlore forums. I wanted to ask here as well to hear from the PrivacyGuides community specifically. If you’re on both forums and have already seen/replied to it there, please feel free to skip this. I’m not trying to spam, just lookin…

Boy, if every new person on the forum knew how to make a post and properly format with proper punctuation and grammar to boot. Well done. And welcome to the forum (and hope you stick around)! Okay, so that’s a lot of info. And sometimes, with too much info and FYIs, its harder to decipher the “best…

Yeah, subscriptions can add up quickly. I went from being fully on Proton to diversifying and self-hosting. If you’re able to, I recommend self-hosting what you can. That said, it can get pretty technical at times so I understand it’s not for everyone.

Do you feel like self-hosting with a homelab by yourself? Quite a lot of services could be managed at home by yourself. Can you/do you feel like doing so or not? :hugs:

I’ll mainly talk about ecosystem vs diverse providers since for most services, I’ve only tried maybe 2-3 providers at most, so I don’t tend to hop between different privacy-oriented services. Proton vs diverse: I do use Proton’s ecosystem, but I also self-host, so not all my data is on Proton. For…

Oh wow, saw this post this morning, shocked by the wall of text, checking back in just now, shocked by walls of text… I will try with a short reply. To me the simpler the better, the best approach is the approach that is easy to stick with, also cheap and easy to maintain. So: Email ( +Calendar,…

Hey all! First off, I wanted to thank everyone for all of the replies. I sat down and read all of them and took a bunch of notes, so thank you all again — I really appreciate it. I apologize for the long original post; I tried to keep it as clean and well‑structured as possible, including the TL;D…

Thanks for the suggestions man! I appreciate it! I reckon that my end game setup will very likely be a similar hybrid approach to yours that you described at some point, with using a combination of self-hosted and Proton eventually. [image] ImTooPhaT: I’m in favour of using a local password man…

[image] anon82422799: I’m new-ish to implementing privacy in a practical way. I’m not trying to evade nation-states, but I do want to regain control of my data and avoid heavily AI-integrated ecosystems and mass surveillance Note that this is a forum where people view privacy as a hobby, but…

[image] anon82422799: To answer on why I wanted two VPNs, it’s mainly for two main reasons: One is just to avoid entrusting all of my VPN traffic to just a single provider, and the second is just so that I could utilize the benefits of two VPNs that would specialize in two different areas. For e…

[image] anon57862721: You’re thinking about VPNs all wrong if you ask me. Proton is just as good as Mullvad from a privacy and security POV. The two offer different things feature or functionality wise but as far as what a VPN is supposed to do and be, they may as well be the same. The only diff…

Looking for a Practical Long‑Term Privacy Stack (Proton, AI, VPNs, Photos, etc.)

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anon82422799 December 10, 2025, 5:15am 10

I am planning on experimenting more with self-hosting once I can afford some proper hardware for it. I have a couple of UnRAID licenses that I would like to put into good use. Once I can self-host, I would love to start experimenting with using Nextcloud, Immich (or self-hosted Ente Photos), and a media server to replace the streaming services that I have currently.

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Looking for a Practical Long‑Term Privacy Stack (Proton, AI, VPNs, Photos, etc.)

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