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If you have any specific questions, be sure to let me know here or in a DM.
Side note: Happy cake day!
It’s a very valid question, I know that networking is quite confusing.
NordVPN and Meshnet are based on the same technology. However, their use cases are a little different.
With a commercial VPN like NordVPN, what you are essentially doing is having your traffic encrypted and then routed through a server in a location you chose. This, among other things, accomplishes two things:
- It adds a layer of security by encrypting your traffic. You can think of encryption as speaking in cipher with someone else who knows the key to the cipher. Eg. My name in a certain cipher would be 1, 4, 1, 13 (A - 1, D-4, A - 1, M - 13).
- It provides you with more privacy, as thousands of users also use the same server you’re using. This means it’s hard for anyone to figure out where the traffic is coming from.
So, in short, a commercial VPN connects you through a server, to the rest of the internet.
Now, you can do the very same thing with Meshnet (we even have a video for this), with certain limitations. But, the main strength of Meshnet is the ability to connect your personal (and other trusted) devices directly, no matter where they are in the world.
This means that you can share files directly and securely (because Meshnet also encrypts the traffic) between different devices. You can also access your private media (as you mentioned) remotely and do many other things.
To answer your question, only enabling Meshnet won’t increase your security or privacy. However, whatever your use case may be, it is generally more secure than other go-to solutions (such as port forwarding, reverse proxies, etc.).
Hope this clears it up a little.
I was in China 5 years ago and used it with no issue. So it did work. Don’t know the current situation. Apparently it doesn’t work now.
It should be fixed now. Thank you for the heads up!
So I’ve been using Meshnet on our phones and I love how easy it’s made using our IP camera/Plex server and not worrying about keeping those ports forwarded/open.
I had two questions if you had time:
- If you have multiple devices on Meshnet, is there a way to customize their names? I can’t seem to see the option for this.
- My wife is on a Pixel 7 and I’m on a S23+. We both have the same issue where if we enable Meshnet while we’re on our home WiFi and leave it works fine after switching to mobile data. However, when we return home and it reconnects to WiFi is completely disables our network connections until we go into the VPN settings on phone and forcefully turn off Meshnet. After this internet/local connection works fine.
Thank you for the response. Yes, I think I get it now.
5 years ago has no bearing on today
It sounds like you have gotten a hang of Meshnet, very cool!
To answer your questions:
- Nicknames have been a long-requested feature and are coming to Meshnet veeeeery soon, so be on the lookout for a feature release post on the subreddit.
- We have reported this to our dev team, who will try to reproduce the issue. It sounds like a platform-specific issue. I will keep you posted on this.
It has a bearing on “it never worked”. It did.
Has no bearing because when I purchased it it never worked. That’s all that matters