Typically it is just unnecessary. And believe it or not VPNs will slow you down too.

Glad to hear it! I just felt an opportunity to share knowledge of what I was working with recently since qBittorrent added support for it. If you’re interested in staying connected you can subscribe to one of the communities on my lemmy instance, wizanons.dev. !general@wizanons.dev and !magic@wizanons.dev Keep in mind we’re very small still but I like keeping up with people and being friendly : )

Yeh I had tried torrenting on Tor a LONG time ago but people made it clear to not do that on Tor for one reason or another. But on i2p, the devs made a torrent client directly into the software. It was one of their features and something they want people to use.

Honestly that is fine. Just consider this to be one of the times you hear about I2P. I also don’t typically start paying much attention to something unless I’ve heard it like 3 or more times.

So it looks like setup on ubuntu should be pretty straightforward. Follow these steps to install the java client as a package: https://geti2p.net/en/download/debian

Then under their Post-install work on the bottom of that page follow this:

as a service that automatically runs when your system boots, even before logging in. The service can be enabled with “dpkg-reconfigure i2p” as root or using sudo. This is the recommended means of operation.

That will cause i2p to automatically run at startup. You can use the other methods there if you don’t want that behavior. Lastly, you’ll need to configure a browser to use i2p. https://geti2p.net/en/about/browser-config

Firefox is a good one to use for it but you can use librewolf or another one.

And I think that’s it as far as setup for ubuntu. Let me know if you have more questions : )

That’s fair. I like proton : )

That’s exactly correct!

Yes! You still get to make outgoing connections to anybody who can accept incoming connections.

Port forwarding makes it so you can accept incoming connections.

Oh also for your last question: Firewalls and NAT. NAT stands for network address translation. NAT is what these services use for getting people to ‘share’ ip addresses in a pool and then map ports to each person/host. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation

It’s worked well enough for me. Keep in mind this is just for public trackers. Private trackers shouldn’t be used with a VPN anyway and you don’t need to use i2p for them.

You can cross-seed with people over clearnet using qBittorrent or BiglyBT, but that also exposes your IP to clearnet people. So you could get DMCA notices if it is copywrited content.

Otherwise typically no you will only be downloading and seeding with people on I2P if you haven’t chosen to cross-seed.

So no, i2p won’t interact with the clearnet at all. So it doesn’t help with access to clearnet sites that are geoblocked. I never used VPNs for geoblocking specifically, just for torrenting, so this wasn’t in my list of use cases.

It makes sense sticking with a VPN if you really need to access a site that is blocked in your country. Or you could use Tor for that, but Tor has its own issues.

Also I’m still not familiar enough with I2P to know if it’s vulnerable to hostile takeover. It IS a completely different protocol from Tor though, so my guess would be it doesn’t have that same issue.

Nope. Disabling port forwarding protects Mullvad from legal liability with respect to illegal content being hosted through their service. Your IP wouldn’t be revealed with or without port forwarding.

I’ll admit I2P is harder to setup than a VPN, but I just kept getting frustrated by having to pay and expose data to various VPN services. I can share tips about running I2P in Linux too.

That’s exactly correct, yes. A VPN is still useful for accessing clearnet websites that you want to conceal from your ISP. I’m arguing that you don’t need to go to clearnet websites for most of the stuff you download from public trackers. private trackers are always going to have great quality releases, but I could see them moving over to i2p at some point as well. Though DMCA shouldn’t be much of a concern for private trackers anyway.

I did explain in another comment some general information about I2P. The one where I mention how it is a darknet but is much different than Tor.

The reason many more people don’t use it yet is because it is hard to setup. That’s pretty much it. Similar to lemmy or other things that exist it is just difficult to get people using it unless it is significantly easier to use.

However, recently things have gotten easier. The dev for i2p has included an easy windows installer for i2p that should make this much better for most users. So some development has happened there.

Also just recently qBittorrent included support for I2P in their latest release. Before that, only 2 Bittorrent clients existed. Now we’re up to 3.

The biggest advantage is that you don’t need to spend money anymore for a VPN. Or any money for a seedbox either if you have a home computer you can just leave up to seed for you.

The biggest disadvantage is the hard setup and (so far) lack of torrent availability. More stuff is getting added all the time but we need more scene groups adding their releases to i2p (cross-seeding).

Port forwarding, which Mullvad was allowing until recently, allows other people to connect to your bittorrent client that is downloading/seeding torrents. This makes it easier for you to find others who can either help you download, or seed for other users in the network.

Basically it improves download speeds and allows you to easily upload to everyone else.

Absolutely agree. I setup qBittorrent to use it and my experience has been great once everything is setup to work, which I’ll admit was tricky trying to use the latest alpha release. Using i2psnark is much easier for most folks for now I think.

Lots of people were looking for new VPNs because of it and Mullvad was officially taken off the list of recommended VPNs (on /r/vpntorrenting) because of this change. I always seed a lot because I have unlimited data so this change forced me to stop using Mullvad.

Completely different protocol, yep. Has nothing to do with Tor really. The only similarity is that both are ‘darknets’

You don’t need to route all traffic, just the traffic from your bittorrent client.

Download speeds have improved significantly as there are more people on there seeding than ever.

i2p is significantly better than a proxy, you jump through multiple hosts/tunnels before reaching the service.

Also it isn’t all network traffic at all, just services connecting through i2p like a web browser you have setup to use it.