One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn't tell you password requirements after you create your account,

To be fair, that is super fucking annoying. I hate when I tell bitwarden to save my password only to have the site come back with it being too long and only some special characters are allowed.

people who use a password manager but store the master password on Discord

??????????

In my experience preaching this same thing to many users at work and just personal friends, they won't change their ways. Because "omg not another password to remember" and "that's too much work to login just to get a password".

I've just stopped trying to educate people at this point. That's on them when their info gets leaked or accounts drained.

My sell on password managers is quality of life. You never have to reset your passwords and you can use a hotkey to enter it faster than typing. Gone are the days of fat fingers.

But I get where people have an issue. It's one point of failure vs. many, but they don't realize It's easier to well secure the one than it is to not spread the same vulnerability everywhere.

You are right. However most of the mainstream YouTubers promote rubbish password managers, which is why most people I know don't know about bitwarden. I usually recommend bitwarden or proton pass. (I'm self-hosting vaultwarden). More privacy focus YouTubers need to promote bitwarden, keepassxc etc. (I'm waiting for proton pass self-hosting option).

I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn't use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.

Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.

Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn't install any software on them that wasn't on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.

I didn't get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they've been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can't reuse passwords, can't write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.

Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it's been wonderful.

I don't know why the military doesn't get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they've been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I'd forget them (and again, we weren't allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don't even need to remember it. I love it!

Personally, I use PassWord123! for everything. It says its a strong and secure password so why wouldn't I use it for everything?

My dad somehow believes that that password managers are very insecure ( he got that from some sort of 'reputable source', so me telling him bitwarden is secure doesn't help) and he just writes down all of his completely randomly generated passwords in a notebook, which always seems really inefficient to me, especially when he writes a character down incorrectly.

Been using 1Password for 6+ years and I probably won’t use anything else ever. My wife and I both use it and have a shared family vault for things we both use. I couldn’t live without a password manager.

I have a password manager with a family plan so my wife can use it. Does she? Absolutely not. And that's why we don't share bank accounts.

Say, what are the chances either

1. someone comes to depend on the password manager to get into their accounts, gets locked out of the password manager, and loses access to all their accounts (e.g. using the password manager to create and store passwords they might never have even seen);

or

2. their password manager (or account) gets hacked, somehow, and all their accounts get taken at once

I blame the tinfoil hat infosec crowd for not understanding that the world they inhabit is not the same one Regular Users live in.

Is there risk in keeping all your passwords in one place, whether it's on your hardware or someone else's? hell yes! Is that risk stastically speaking ANYTHING LIKE the risk you take when you use 'pencil' for all your passwords because you can't be arsed to memorize anything more complex? OH HELL YES.

Sure, if you're defending against nation state level agressors, maybe using a password manager isn' the wisest choice, but for easily 99% of computer users, we're at the level of "keeping people from drooling on their shoes". So password managers are probably a GREAT idea.

Been using Bitwarden for a couple years now…

No regrets

On the plus side, the more people who don't use password managers the more chance us password manager users will remain not worth the effort.

It's kinda like security through obscurity mixed with only having to be faster than the slowest person to outrun a lion.

I tell non techy people to use a physical book that they can secure. People know how to do hide things or put them in a safe. Digital security is harder to understand and I would say a book in a safe place is way better than reusing passwords they find hard to remember.

Absolutely this. Been using KeePassDX for years and its made my life so much easier. I am waiting for it to support passkeys so i can start using them where possible.

I've been using Proton Pass and it has been a game changer for me. Hot take: I think Proton Pass is Proton's best service.

It creates not only a unique password for each service but also a unique email address alias. If a website leaks my email address and I get spam, I know exactly who did it and I only need to swap 1 login credential.

Has a built-in 2FA and passkeys. Works great in the browser with proper auto complete, even for the 2FA code. Works fine on Android and password in both browser and applications get autocomplete.

Proton Pass can be used by everyone, regardless of their technical level, in every device. My mom could easily use this across all her devices. I'm told Keepass is fantastic but having it sync across all her devices would be challenging for her.

Most Proton services feel kinda underbaked but Proton Pass is excellent.

Using 2FA on all accounts that offer it is just as important. And make sure to use a good, open-source TOTP client like Aegis on Android or Tofu on iOS.

Definitely make sure to backup your seeds in an encrypted format (e.g. Veracrypt container or GPG-encrypted files). If you lose your seeds, you lose access to your accounts.
I like to use the automatic backup feature in Aegis, which syncs my encrypted vault to my Nextcloud server. You can also enable compatibility with Android's backup API and use that if your ROM includes a backup solution like Seedvault.

is it possible to sync keepassxc between computers + phone?

Self-hosted bitwarden. Highly recommend

Using Proton Pass was a game changer to me , I don't have to ignore the necessity to put a strong and complicated password for security reasons anymore, Proton generate it to me and stores everything ( so I don't need to remember which password I set for which account ) But the bad aspects of cloud services worry me a little about this: the possibility of a security breach of the service, or the possibility of not being able to access it for any reason is a real disaster if it happens... so I'm thinking of exporting my passwords to another safe place for such cases.

I'd be open to using a pw manager then I read the comments here and everyone is suggesting different apps, arguing over how inconvenient one or the other it, various issues, etc. It doesn't make me feel like taking action if everything feels sketchy.

I don't even understand why I need to make a password for some sites anymore. They send a code to my phone everytime.to make.sure it's me so it seems like there's practically no point.

Quick question - what are your opinions on using Firefox's inbuilt password manager? I've installed Bitwarden as an extension, but I find Firefox to be more convenient.

I mostly use FF on Linux, Windows, and Android and have no issues with using FF cross platforms.