karce

Exactly how I feel too. It pretty much had to be done.

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.

I think the only use-case maybe not covered is finding torrents that aren't uploaded to the I2P tracker yet. They need to be cross-seeded from people who originally uploaded them or from people downloading them from the clearnet to be available.

An example of this is anime. There is significantly less anime available on i2p currently than there are on sites like nyaa.si. People can cross-seed these torrents to make them available on i2p. I do that, for instance. But other than that I can't think of any other use case that isn't covered.

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.