I found I2P much better than Tor network, and now it supports BitTorrent protocol too https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent .

Why haven’t the pirates migrated to I2P? Why are we still using clearnet and making people backout of seeding cause of DMCA?

  • Qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com
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    1 year ago

    The main reason is that libtorrent, which is the literal backbone of most torrenting clients, has implemented supported for I2P only recently in its latest v2.x branch… It takes time for libtorrent to iron out bugs and stablize and it takes more for clients to upgrade their embedded libtorrent to v2.x.

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is the best answer. The software just has to mature a little bit more. But it’s a matter of time.

      Once we reach the phase where most mainstream bittorrent clients support I2P by default, it will become the new standard.

      Most people don’t use bleeding edge features.

      • Qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com
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        1 year ago

        I hate to put it this way because libtorrent is a wonderful piece of open-source software maintained by volunteers but as is typical with its history, releases are going to be bumpy.

        • ayaya@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          Yeah my comment wasn’t a knock at the software or devs. I just think libtorrent v2 is not quite ready for widespread use yet. Since OP is talking people migrating to I2P then it needs to be more stable before that can happen. A few years from now I’m sure it will be a great option.

  • toxictenement@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    From what I have read on the upcoming implementation on i2p in qbit, I do not forsee it being adopted by the core torrent user base. The main issue I have with it is that while you can download from clearnet peers, you are only able to seed to other i2p peers. This completely eliminates any adoption by anyone using private trackers. Its not like the guys in brazil are going to jump through an extra hoop to hide their ip since they never needed to in the first place, so they can be ruled out for adoption as well. What I really fear is that its going to create a completely unnecessary schism in the userbase with a sort of ‘leechnet’ walled garden of i2p users which would hurt the greater availability of seeders. I also haven’t gotten a straight answer from anyone how ports are going to work in i2p, since normally its imperative to have a forwarded port in order to be a full participant. Unless i2p users can seed to clearnet users without issue, I am going to be worried about the impact on torrent health as a whole.

    • Lemmchen@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      This completely eliminates any adoption by anyone using private trackers

      Doesn’t it make the use of private trackers obsolete when no one can get sued anymore because they’re all using an anonymous overlay network?

      • Photographer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Its makes VPN obsolete, not sure about Private Trackers, they have a lot of things that public don’t due to retention.

  • indirect_existence@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    i’ve messed around with i2p, it requires much more technical knowledge than just torrenting and there’s a bit of a learning curve to navigating and configuring it. plus it honestly hasn’t changed much in years, and i’m not sure how much i trust the developers working on it. i do agree that it’s better than tor though

    • idkman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Can you trust Tor or VPN? Tor was developed with the help of US intelligence to help build a anonymous network.

      • Pulp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Read all of the source and research who hosts the relays to determine their trustworthiness. Decide for yourself

        • idkman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          1 year ago

          That’s great. But not everyone is interested learning and setting up their own VPS. If it was trivial no VPN service would be in business.

    • idkman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s not really a hassle to configure your i2p node. I2p network recently went through a DDOS attack. Even during that point of time I had no issue surfing/torrenting.

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ah, I meant that there isn’t enough content on I2P because people are lazy to switch. For example, I torrent Asian media (using nyaa) and the last time I tried using I2P, I didn’t find a lot of what I wanted. Hence I decided to go for a seedbox.

        Cheers

        • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Yeah that’s one big hurdle to get past sadly, it’s like getting people to switch to a new chat app “no ones on it I talk to so I’m not bothering”

  • Madiator2011@lm.madiator.cloud
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    1 year ago

    Probably mostly cause:

    • Slow speed unless you you keep your router 24/7
    • People are used to download torrents fast
    • Clearnet has much bigger torrent database
    • idkman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago
      • if you configure your node correctly, you won’t see much difference in bandwidth.
      • i2psnark can be fast.
      • but clearnet comes with an issue of tracking.
      • whynotzoidberg@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think your response answers the question.

        If configured correctly. Can be fast. IMO, once those statements are less conditional and prone to error, we might see the pro of privacy carry more weight.

        • Anamana@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          People don’t understand sometimes how much of a tech-ethusiast bubble we got going on here

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Of course. Your idea is THE idea. You CANNOT get mass adoption without a minimal amount of hops. You won’t get the hordes of pirates running around reading wikis on how to configure their router for piracy and how to get an i2p provider and how to get an index etc.

            Torrenting right now is so broadly adopted because you just download a Torrenting client, click the magnet, click OK and you’re good to go.

            If you HAD to set up port forwarding, some magnet handling register in windows preferences, just those two would stop the bulk majority of pirates. And that’s not even 1/4 of what you have to do to use i2p correctly.

      • ellipse@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        What kind of speeds are you seeing per torrent and global with a few torrents running? I didn’t try torrenting on I2p yet but even with my node on 24/7 even browsing was hella slow ( i was port forwarded too)

        • CAVOK@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Typically around 500kBps I’d say. I’ve seen speeds in the MBps too, but that’s rare.

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            That’s quite slow then. I can torrent an entire movie within two minutes or so.

            Edit: Getting 12+ MiB/s with a popular movie from 2006.

            • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              Yeah that’s fair, I wonder how much faster it’ll get if I2P gets a ton more nodes and more people seeding torrents

            • ellipse@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              Yeah that is really slow and they didn’t say if it was global or a single torrent. 500kbs is slow for one torrent but if 500kbs is all the torrents combined then that is extremely slow

  • camethroughtor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    The more people who use I2P for relatively normal reasons like piracy, the safer it is for people who want to avoid censorship.

    Its reputation of Dread bezo addicts is probably why nobody uses it unfortunately

  • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
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    1 year ago

    Because people believe a VPN or a seedbox is gonna save them from legal repercussions. They paid for it with their real information and credit card too, for convenience. They compromised their private tracker identity and must abandon the trackers the moment the legal landscape incentives companies to pursue individual copyright infringements. But most probably won’t, and face the consequences if that ever happens.

      • Rearsays@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I had someone explain to me how it really isn’t a privacy concern to use usenet but financially it does feel like a bit of a bamboozle but you have to realize that usenet often will max out your download speed which is pretty nice and it has some magic that prevents people from knowing what you’re trying to access so it’s likely worth the like $10/mo

          • Rearsays@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            There’s almost no way to really hide you as a user in that protocol.

            • kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Shouldn’t a VPN hide you? I get that port + user agent can be an identifier, but all you have to do is stay up to date and change your port every so often, then you’re good. If not, let me know, cheers

              • Rearsays@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                tl;dr bit torrent is just a way to overcome file distribution issues in a secure and repeatable way and by secure I don’t mean private and yes vpn can work if implemented correctly but theres lots of failure modes for vpns which will leak your info. Just about any old turd with php skills and no real knowledge of how privacy works can spin up a legitimate enough looking vpn company to dip into all of the people looking to skirt Netflix rules.

                I said specifically “in that protocol” all bit torrent does is it breaks down everything to a hash that can be looked up in a dht wich holds all of the addresses of the individuals sharing that hashed data. I’m not wrong. You can always have a vpn I mean look how hard China tries to stop vpns and still will likely never really nail it down so long as cryptography on the internet is necessary. They would have to deploy Red Star Linux and a whole gestapo to randomly audit chinese citizens computers directly. So long as we have open source hardware keeping big tech and five eyes etc countries and spy agencies a touch more honest we will have lots of ways around all of the censorship and antipiracy trashbags.

                • kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca
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                  1 year ago

                  You just rambled on for a bit without really answering my question: how does taking the proper measures (VPN, changing port, updating client, using anonymous mode if available) not make you more private during the file sharing?

                  I understand how the bittorrent protocol works, but with constant randomization you should have no unique identifier except if youre the only seeder on 10 old torrents… So please clarify

        • illiteratewhino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          If you look around you can get it for $3.50 a month (I have an account with News Demon that’s unlimited for that price, which I don’t remember exactly but I think I got it during a black friday sale)

          • Rearsays@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Just remember that this is no longer Reddit and you’re likely welcomed to post links to things for other Lemmy users to find.

  • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think non technical people find the concept of a network within a network confusing. I think its more of i2p itself.

    I do think it is the future of filesharing and if I was to create a torrent I’d use i2p. Hopefully with more clients implementing support it sees further adoption.

    • RunAwayFrog@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I do think it is the future of filesharing

      In internet years, Torrenting is old. I2P is old. Even torrenting in I2P is old. Nothing about this is “the future”.

      Ideally, the future of file sharing would involve a fully/natively integrated anonymous network with content-addressable distributed filesystem.

      But this will probably not happen, as that architecture didn’t see large scale success before, except in Japan where at least some elements of this architecture are used in their popular P2P networks.

      The I2P crowd themselves tried with Tahoe-LAFS, but that was never really a network, even aMule over I2P had more traction, and by traction I mean tens or hundreds of users, not thousands or beyond.

      Ironically, the one content-addressable distributed filesystem that gained some attraction (outside Japan) is IPFS, which doesn’t offer anonymity, or replication, or anything special really. Yet for some reason, some hype-susceptible techies liked it, together with the NFT crowd, a great fit.

      The future of file sharing will depend on where most content will land where it will be easily accessible and quickly grabbable. How those networks will look like? Nobody knows.

      • CAVOK@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ideally, the future of file sharing would involve a fully/natively integrated anonymous network with content-addressable distributed filesystem.

        Isn’t this just Freenet?

        • RunAwayFrog@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Yes. That was what I’m alluding to when I wrote:

          that architecture didn’t see large scale success before, except in Japan

          Perfect Dark is a major network in Japan. Freenet is a network most people in the globe are not aware of. Hell, Perfect Dark may have a larger Japanese user-base than Freenet’s global one.

          It’s worth mentioning that the former leader of the Freenet project wasn’t the most competent. Combine that with him spending years trying (and failing) to cater to the needs of imaginary dictatorships’ defectors (anyone of them using Freenet instead of Tor is the imaginary part), instead of focusing on maximizing the reliability and performance of the network to help its actual users. So it’s not just the ignorance of the masses that was at fault. The default FN user experience was often a horrible one. And users needed to ignore the officially-recommended microblog/forum applications, and even use a patched FN version, to get a decent performance out of the network.

          Anyway, Freenet is the past and the present. And as I wrote in the parent comment, I hope a Freenet-like network would become a major success in the future, but I’m not holding my hopes up.

          • CAVOK@lemmy.world
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            I feel that there’s so much potential in Freenet that’s not being utilized. Or “Hyphanet” as it’s now called. It could be one of the coolest things ever, but as it is I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go there because of the default FN experience.

  • TalkingCat-@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve used it to test, I don’t do it because I can torrent fine on clearnet and I feel like doing it is needlessly congesting the network, consuming traffic that I don’t really need.

  • vtez44@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It supported torrent for ages, but it has only one tracker that doesn’t really have very much content. Now qBitTorrent or something else supports it out of the box.

    I2P is very slow, slower than Tor. Maybe after more people join, it will be faster. Last time I tried it was painfully slow to even load most eepsites.

      • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I’ve been doing it for 20 years and have never been caught. I’ve never even heard of i2p until here just a couple of weeks ago. The fact that certain people are pushing it so hard and referring to standard methods in such a derogatory way makes me highly skeptical of trying it out.

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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          Just because you haven’t been caught doesn’t mean https is suddenly a private way to pirate. It’s really not that complicated.

          • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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            And just because there is some new method available doesn’t mean you’re retaining your privacy there either. I have a VPN to hide my IP and as far as I’m concerned that’s enough ‘privacy’ to avoid any issues.

            What’s the worst that’ll happen, my ISP sends me a letter telling me to knock it off? You’re acting like this is some sort of top secret black ops mission in need of complete secrecy.

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s not even prosecuted where I live. So I couldn’t care less if it’s clearnet or whether my IP address is public.

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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          That’s my point, that’s significantly more effort then just implementing i2p. You shouldn’t have to worry about that because we should be using better protocols. It’s the protocol’s fault here, and VPNs are band-aid solutions.

            • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              BiglyBT handles all of the I2P router itself if you don’t have a existing install, you can point it to an existing I2P install if you have one that’s running 24/7 so is well integrated which is what I do

  • riley0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Because I’m not knowledgeable enough to make it work. I’ve managed to install it and figured out that I need to run the restartable version. Lots of text with screenshots or a video(s) would help. I’m not a digital native. This is one of many retirement projects. Listening to more music than I can afford to buy greatly improves the quality of my life.