After the Mullvad fiasco I decided to stop using VPNs all together, since port forwarding is always going to be a problem on all of them, if you read the reasons why Mullvad had to shut down that service.

There is a better way using i2p which conceals your IP and makes it impossible for anyone to know what or if you’re downloading at all! No DMCA notices, no problem.

I wrote this small guide to another comment and figured I’d share it in its own post since I’m seeing so many people ask for VPN recommendations.

So there are 2 main implementations of i2p. First is the main Dev’s Java client here https://geti2p.net/en/download

The other is i2pd, which is C++.

I use the Java one personally but both would work. Someone posted back on reddit a guide on /r/i2p for qbittorrent, which is what I use now for this too. The guide was shared as a public torrent you can download with this info hash: 3f1d51095f9b116739172c1bced149acf2b10692

Use that hash with any of the various public trackers and you should be able to download that guide.

But if you just want a basic setup, that Java client comes with i2psnark, which is a Bittorrent client already setup.

The only other thing you want to do is go and search the biggest tracker for stuff, which is called PaTracker, Postman’s tracker. http://tracker2.postman.i2p, only accessible from i2p itself, which you’ll need to have setup and running first to view.

This tracker needs more seeders and uploaders in general, and by improving those things service for everyone is better. So the more the merrier.

Thanks! Feel free to ask any questions, there also might be other people who use i2p now for torrenting. I’m sure they’ll help too.

  • BrotherCod@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I2p is not a substitution for a proxy. I2p is an end-to-end encryption Network and unless it’s changed over the past couple of years it’s incredibly slow for any multimedia transfer. Coupled on top of that you have to have the knowledge to be able to set up your full system to route all traffic through it. So using it as a a security step for most people is already out of the question. It’s not like a VPN where you can just plug and play. Having your entire network communicate through l2p is going to make everything substantially slower.

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      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.

      • TooL@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Doesn’t this still have the same vulnerability of the potential for a hostile takeover similar to tor? Also, is there any way to use i2p to bypass geoblocking? If not that’s a major reason why I and many people use vpns.

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Truck-kun
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            1 year ago

            I don’t even use VPNs for torrenting lol. I use them only for either geoblocking or scrambling my IP address for practical clearnet purposes such as signing up multiple accounts. Torrenting is not prosecuted or even mentioned in my country. The only issue I could have is my ISP not liking my download volume and throttling for a short period of time to counteract my “abuse” of the network.

        • kitonthenet@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          hostile takeover similar to tor

          yes but the NSA/FBI are not going after you for seeding family guy, they’re there to get the CSAM and drugs

      • dustojnikhummer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And what do I gain with this over having my torrent client bound to a wireguard interface running through a commercial VPN provider?

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • dustojnikhummer@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            but that also exposes your IP to clearnet people. So you could get DMCA notices if it is copywrited content.

            So, for pretty much everyone this is the same as torrenting without a VPN at all.

      • nivenkos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But the multiple jumps make it very slow.

        There’s a reason we want port forwarding for near direct connections for torrenting.

        • ZeroNationality@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          That’s not why port forwarding is important. Port forwarding is needed so that fresh peers can communicate with you and join the swarm. That act has the side-effect of speeding up transfers by allowing more people into the swarm spreading the transfer across more potential seeds/peers

      • null_void@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Could i2p reasonably even handle this kind of traffic? Torrenting is one of the most network intensive workloads I can think of.

  • FloppyFlounder8@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    I’m skeptical of changing what works. Haven’t had any issues with the VPN I use. I’ll keep this in mind for sure nonetheless.

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Taubin@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It’s not really a fiasco at all. OP seems to be blowing it way out of proportion. For the vast majority of users it’s not a big deal at all. They are disallowing port forwarding due to how many letters/threats they’ve gotten from their datacenters and law enforcement.

      • Danacus@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz
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        1 year ago

        This is very annoying, because it makes it hard for other peers to connect with my server and it will make it harder to seed. This is bad, I will likely switch next year.

  • Oozy@u.fail
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    1 year ago

    I2pd + Qbittorrent is the best solution. Simple to setup and works great, the only catch is that right now you need to use the Qbittorrent alpha version (because it has i2p support) or just wait for the release.

    Highly recommend experimenting with i2p, there’s cool stuff on it as well!

    And if more people join i2p to torrent the faster the speeds will get. You are a seeder of the i2p network basically. (Which is great!)

    • elouboub@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      BiglyBT: A Feature-Rich bittorrent client including I2P support and the unique ability to “Bridge” regular torrents in-to I2P so people can download them anonymously.

      source

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • lp0101@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Fuck, this is how I find out Mullvad is dropping support for port forwarding.

    I already have a protonmail account, guess I’ll get the VPN too now. My entire setup relies on using wireguard on the firewall level, so another solution like i2p won’t work

  • Kaldo@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Can you go a bit more into detail what it actually is, what are its advantages and disadvantages and how it works? I find it weird that people are still paying for VPNs if the superior solution that consists of just running this program existed this whole time, there’s gotta be a catch that you’re not mentioning. What or who exactly guarantees anonymity and safety if using this tool?

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      1 year ago

      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).

      • niktemadur@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The biggest advantage is that you don’t need to spend money anymore for a VPN

        Unless you use it for accessing and switching to and from Canadian/UK Netflix or something like that on a Roku or Firestick, I presume.

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          1 year ago

          That is correct. For geoblocked content only available in certain regions, a VPN is still useful. However, much of that content can be obtained through other methods. You could download it and use Plex/Jellyfin to stream it to Roku or Firestick.

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      1 year ago

      Mullvad disabled port forwarding due to bad people abusing it. It would happen to anyone honestly.

      • Bistro@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        If thats what the poster is calling a “fiasco”, thats a bit much. I was curious what Port forwarding was when that announcement first happened and Mullvad themselves said if you didn’t know what Port forwarding was before their announcement, nothing was changing for you in regards to their services. This is only a fiasco (to my understanding) if you’re someone who file-shares/torrent. Not saying the poster is spreading bad faith or whatever of course.

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Bistro@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Yeah I realized my dumbness when I reread the post again a third time and used logic. I just simply didn’t read hence why I deleted my comment like 10 minutes after I posted it. My fault on that one.

      • goinroguein10@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Does this have any serious implications for the average VPN user? Like would any torrenting reveal your IP without port forwarding?

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          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.

      • 4am@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Can’t say i blame them if it was basically becoming the “clearnet CP site” solution.

      • ReCursing@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Bah! And i have about three quarters of a year paid up with them! Oh well, so long as I can still torrents some I’m sure I’ll be okay

  • anivia@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Huh, I’ve been using a VPN for torrent without setting up any kind of port forwarding! Can someone explain why you might want to do this?

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      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.

      • anivia@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I see, thanks for clarifying! Even without port-forwarding, I’m able to make some connections. Is there just a more limited set of destination IPs I’m able to connect to? What dictates whether or not I’m able to connect?

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          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

          • anivia@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Interesting. So when I’m connecting to peers for downloading, these connections can be initiated in both ways? And since I’m not currently port-forwarding, this means I can only actively find peers, rather than passively accepting incoming connections?

  • –Phase–@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Thanks for the info. Although this can’t really replace VPNs for my specific use-cases, this is still very useful info to have just in case. Good to know there are alternatives. Thanks also for including the info hash for the guide.

  • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Doesn’t this make every user the equivalent of a Tor exit node? Meaning you’ll have possibly dodgy traffic appearing to come from your internet service?

    • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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      No. I2P works differently than Tor. There are no exit nodes, because there are no exits. I2P is separate from all clearnet traffic. For example, you cannot browse reddit.com from within i2p, like you can with tor.

      • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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        Gotcha. So its basically a large, decentralized overlay network…ie you can’t use it to “privately” access clearnet content as you can with a VPN. Sounds like the headline is misleading.

        • Karce@wizanons.devOP
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          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.

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

    • Dienervent@kbin.social
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      Seems like i2p has its own version of exit nodes. So if you’re not configured as an exit node you should be in the clear as all communications are end to end encrypted, so it would be difficult to impossible to determine what is passing through you as an intermediate node.

  • jokkayom@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    I’m hoping DHT and PEX support comes to libtorrent eventually so that qbittorrent can use DHT/PEX with I2P and not just http trackers. I think only i2psnark and a few other clients support it right now. I encourage everyone to cross seed their public torrents to the I2P network and upload to patracker to support the network. Unfortunately, for niche content and private trackers VPNs/seedboxes are a necessity