It’s not how I normally torrent but it does seem to work okay. I’ve been experimenting with cross-seeding public torrents into I2P via qBittorrent 5.x (just using I2P, not torrenting publicly / no mixed mode / no need for VPN).
I’ve only picked up a few peers needing torrents I cross seed that way but otherwise does seem to work. Mainly the test torrents seem to get more hits e.g. seeding Ubuntu Linux ISOs so other people can test their torrent I2P setups.
I will add that currently I2P torrenting is a bit limited since Libtorrent itself does not support DHT via I2P so torrent clients like qBittorrent won’t either. You always need to add I2P trackers to your torrents if you intend to torrent within I2P using qBittorrent or any Libtorrent based client.
The only torrent client that has the ability to torrent via DHT on I2P is I2P’s own built-in torrent client (i2psnark) but that client has a lot of its own limitations, it’s hard to use it as a primary torrent client.
Ive been torrenting on I2P with qBittorrent for a lil while now, its not as fast as the clearnet, the fastest speed down ive ever got so far is 1.7MB/s, and this was on a torrent with loads of seeders. Its possible to increase your tunnel quantity and lower the amount of hops each tunnel has for better performance, but you will have less anonymity with less tunnel length.
But so far its been nice, there is no need to think about NAT/Firewall, as all peers can communicate with each other, but it doesnt have as much content as the clearnet, so I try to cross-seed what I can. But when im torrenting, I try to go I2P-first, and then fallback on the clearnet if I couldnt find what I was looking for.
Have been using it for quite some time now and honestly I have found almost everything I searched for and once you set the router bandwidth properly, I was capable of downloading and seeding with 2MB/s. Satisfied my needs and gotta say not worrying about Letters coming to you is very calming
How is it compared to private trackers?
It’s kind of an apples to oranges. i2p is better at protecting your privacy in my estimation, but private trackers can be better at curating high quality torrents for example.
I don’t know of any private trackers on i2p and have just used Postman mainly (the other trackers have very limited content). Postman is OK but not nearly as good as regular private trackers. If what you want are blockbuster films and the latest TV, you’ll be fine. Anything particularly nerdy you will probably find too.
Really depends on how much of a niche the things you are looking for are. Content is quite easily to search with postman. As I personally don’t really use private trackers I don’t have a lot to compare to, but most torrents I have stumbled upon had a healthy amount of seeders on i2p
I have not tried it myself but I found a paper that compares i2p to tor for latency/bandwidth. https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/ehlert2011:usability-comparison-i2p-tor.pdf
How would you? It’s supposed to be an enclosed system.
What do you mean enclosed system? There are I2P trackers.
tracker2.postman.i2p
It is harder to use than Tor though. Qbittorrent also supports I2P.
Oh, interesting, I wasn’t aware.
What I meant is there’s supposed to be no access to/from the clearnet in I2P, since you asked.
But interesting to know there are I2P trackers.
Also, there are outproxies that provide access to clearnet. The public ones are usually overloaded and slow though.
I’m aware that there are, even though there really shouldn’t be because its purpose isn’t the same as TOR afaia.
I only found out when I saw a setting for I2P in qbittorrent, I went and researched about them.
