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.

I'm not personally going back to reddit. I've had problems with them for a while now so I'm glad they finally forced me off their platform.

I understand what you mean though. Lemmy definitely has a way to go to be more user friendly but I think we'll get there at this rate.

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 genuinely can't believe people preorder games but especially Bethesda games, which are notoriously buggy at launch and have tons of issues.

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.

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.

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

Yeh I had tried torrenting on Tor a LONG time ago but people made it clear to not do that on Tor for one reason or another. But on i2p, the devs made a torrent client directly into the software. It was one of their features and something they want people to use.

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.

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).

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

That's exactly correct!

So it looks like setup on ubuntu should be pretty straightforward. Follow these steps to install the java client as a package: https://geti2p.net/en/download/debian

Then under their Post-install work on the bottom of that page follow this:

as a service that automatically runs when your system boots, even before logging in. The service can be enabled with "dpkg-reconfigure i2p" as root or using sudo. This is the recommended means of operation.

That will cause i2p to automatically run at startup. You can use the other methods there if you don't want that behavior. Lastly, you'll need to configure a browser to use i2p. https://geti2p.net/en/about/browser-config

Firefox is a good one to use for it but you can use librewolf or another one.

And I think that's it as far as setup for ubuntu. Let me know if you have more questions : )

Hey OP, a lot of people are suggesting psilocybin or other psychedelics. If you're interested you can ask questions about that in the [email protected] community. I moderate it but there are psychonauts there that know about this stuff who are friendly and helpful.

Curating the proper set of subs is the real winner. Gonna spend quite a while finding communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I2P is a darknet similar to Tor in some ways, but it is perfectly legal and safe to use depending on what you're doing on it, of course.

It is used for regular browsing and running services on. People setup hidden services like websites or mail servers or anything on it really. Lemmy could theoretically be hosted over I2P as well, it just wouldn't federate properly with these ones on the clearnet.

Any other info you would want included? I2P can get pretty in depth but that's my basic understanding of what I use it for.