Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
Wondering if it’s time that we as an anti-authoritarian left community, establish our own VPN…
Anything shared here would inevitably be (or become) a honeypot. If you want a community-driven VPN, it would need to be something like Tor. Individual nodes being hosted by the community, and a zero-trust system to ensure no single node sees enough traffic to ID users.
But the issue with this is that a malicious actor (like the government) could simply spin up enough nodes to be able to capture the system. A zero-trust system like Tor is only secure because it is large. It’s not economical for a single actor to run enough nodes to reliably capture all three connections in the chain. But if it’s a small group (like Lemmy) starting up their own system, then it would be trivial for a larger organization to simply outnumber the two or three dozen safe nodes.
There’s the I2P network too. Not a VPN as such, but there are exit nodes and you can run one yourself if you want.
What do you consider to be “anti-authoritarian left?”
So… A honeypot?
If it’s a honeypot for fascists but not one for antifascists, maybe. But I’d prefer no honeypot at all, rather one where governance is from the labourers, to the labourers.
A VPN operated exclusively for a single political group would flag everyone using it as that group.
True, I suppose a VPN operated by those supporting that group, then.
Not a honeypot, but a target. I see.
What do you suggest otherwise? I don’t want my money to go to fascists or surveillance states.
You don’t get that choice. Beans soak up the flavor of the broth, rocks get thrown out in the trash.
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you literally have no control over what other people do and the whole point of a marketplace is to drill the social relationship down to cash.
A vpn service with a political angle like you suggested would immediately be targeted.
It’s why you can buy a che tee shirt but not actually ship oil to Cuba.
If you need the security of mullvad then i recommend you use it.
Now a communist vpn would be a great piece of political theater! Get one going then get black bagged over it, run a social media campaign to raise awareness, levitate the pentagon, it’d be fantastic!
Soo, TOR but without the multiple nodes and CIA?
Nym existe i thing their founders are anarchist. But don’t know if they are trust worthy. The people involve seam decent https://nym.com/about
RiseUp VPN already exists. I trust that they aren’t feds but I also assume the feds have snuck some sort of spyware on them asap.