Just a PSA that I2P exists if you want to try out anonymous torrenting. Head over to I2P for questions on how to set it up.

I won’t answer questions that could get me into legal trouble, but I’d be happy to help with more generic I2P things.

  • pvq
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    2 years ago

    Unfortunately the elephant in the room with I2P for torrenting is speed, given its routing nature. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve seen it discussed in the past and how people were complaining about dial-up speeds. In your experience, what have your speeds been like? What’s your average download speed? I’m guessing lower than 100kbps?

    If it’s that slow, do you think it’s a problem of not enough peers… or of the routing protocol that needs to happen for privacy?

    • CAVOK@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years ago

      Speed is an issue. That’s the trade-off you do for security. However the speeds have improved over the last couple of releases, but no where near what you get from “normal” torrenting.

      Can’t say what my average speed is because I don’t know, but I believe it’s higher.

    • CAVOK@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years ago

      Just to update you on the speed issue. I’m trying out a small swarm legal download at the moment, less than 10 peers and I’m at +300kBps, which admittedly is shit compared to what you can get from normal torrents. I have seen download speeds in the MBps, but that’s rare.

      I’d guess normal speeds are 1 - 500kBps.

      • pvq
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        2 years ago

        It’s worth pointing out that depending on the type of content you’re downloading +300kBps is pretty darn good. For ebooks, audiobooks, songs, and some isos those speeds are plenty. It’d be pretty interesting if a niche around those kind of contents developed for I2P torrenting.

  • 0xCAFe@feddit.de
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    2 years ago

    I know about I2P for some time now and I really like the pitch, but I never got around of actually trying it sadly.

  • Elieas
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    2 years ago

    Is torrenting actually allowed/encouraged on i2p or is it something possible but frowned on by the community? How’s torrenting speed compared to clearnet torrenting or socks5/vpn torrenting?

    • CAVOK@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years ago

      What makes it different is that I2P uses something called garlic routing to anonymize you and everyone participating in the swarm. So nobody can tell what you’re downloading, except those in the same swarm, but they can’t tell who you are because your id in the swarm isn’t connected to your IP-address.

      Other than that it’s pretty much normal torrenting. Many clients such as BiglyBT already support I2P.

  • Vitaly@feddit.uk
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    2 years ago

    how to enable this I2P in qbittorrent? Or if its not possible what torrent client do you recommend for Linux?

    • CAVOK@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 years ago

      I don’t use qbittorent I’m afraid, but someone created a tutorial for it if you know how to download from a torrent hash it’s here: Torrent hash = 3F1D51095F9B116739172C1BCED149ACF2B10692

      If not then there’s a built in torrent client called I2PSnark in the java version. It’s rather basic but it’ll get the job done.

          • Vitaly@feddit.uk
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            2 years ago

            but it’s working only on applications that i need, right(torrent client for example)?

                • CAVOK@lemmy.worldOP
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                  2 years ago

                  No, not system wide by default. Change your browser proxy to localhost:4444 and you should be able to reach i2p-sites like http://planet.i2p or the bittorrent tracker (linked in the I2P sub). Changing that will make use of the outproxies so it’ll kind of work like TOR.

  • kixik
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    2 years ago

    AFAIK, the issue with i2p is what trackers one can hook to, right? I believe only special trackers supporting i2p, and with limited content are out there. Has that changed?

    To me, that’s even more important than speed.