Tribler: Peer-to-Peer decentralized torrent client

Barzaria@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 113 points – Tribler: Peer-to-Peer decentralized torrent client
tribler.org

I wanted to gauge interest in Tribler. It claims to be a tor-like p2p client created by privacy researchers. Has anyone had experience with Tribler? Did you get any takedown notices? What were speeds like?

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I sorta don't get it. Aren't torrents sorta the original peer to peer thing to begin with?

Torrents are p2p and can be encrypted but aren't anonymous. Tribler claims to be tor-like and no trust needed i.e. anonymous.

Original? No. Usenet, BBS, IRC are the originals. Napster made it hip. Soul seek made it better. Then there was Limewire, DirectConnect, and some others. Then there was BitTorrent, which I really did use to download Linux ISOs before the rise of popular public and private trackers.

3 more...

I've tried it before, the speeds are abysmal to the point of being unusable. It took me 3 days to download something that was only 50mb when I last tried it.

I remember those days. Except back then you had the added challenge of finding space for it on your 1.2GB hard drive

Assuming it does use tor: who would've guessed?

It's not tor, it's supposed to be it's own anonymizing network since tor doesn't support UDP or something.

I'm not sure I need to onion my torrents. I feel like routing through a decent VPN is probably good enough. I guess if I had all night to transfer a 5MB PDF document that was going to collapse a government this would be what I'd use?

Does nobody use the god given Repository of all human knowledge?

There are privacy issues that still have not been addressed as of 2023:

A privacy review of Tribler, the onion-routed BitTorrent app

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent.html

Daniel Aleksandersen 2022-01-11 10:35Z

Hi Anth0rx, yes — I’ve looked into all of them. Here are some hot-takes:

Loginet is just a front for a cryptocurrency. It’s decentralized but not distributed. It’s primary purpose is to selling you hot air, though.

I2P can only talk to other I2P users. There are far from enough users on it to reliably use it for P2P. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it just never reached critical mass. The set-up process is probably too complicated for most potential users.

GNUnet has been “fixing the internet” for literally two decades. They‘ve yet to deliver anything. The software download pages clearly warns that it’s still “not yet ready”. It’s an interesting project, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Daniel Aleksandersen 2023-07-02 15:17Z

The project change log does not indicate any work on any of the things discussed in this article. I might revisit this after the next beta release.

TLDR: Censorship resistant doesn't mean anything if they can find you and nail you to a cross

I have been using tribler for a few years. It works well, abeit a bit slower than a plain torrent program, but still very reasonable.

I see a lot of people talking about using I2P for torrents but, as far as I know, I2P cannot use torrents from outside the I2P network. In addition to this, there is a non-trivial setup and confusing interface that people need to learn, whereas Tribler acts like any other torrent program, just with onion style routing. I really like I2P, but there's still more work to be done to attract more people and make it a truly viable alternative for most torrent needs.

i think I2P needs better usability like what they did with the tor browser in the beginning it was a pain to use now it just works like a normal browser you just install and done.

I've been looking at I2P to overcome commercial grade NAT. What's the setup like? Everyone says its complex, but is it complicated?

It's not super complicated, but you are unlikely to figure it out without a couple internet searches. You have to setup the router, which isn't that difficult, and then wait to get connections. the torrent client is built into the router software, but you have to find the right I2P sites to get torrents because, as far as I know, only torrents inside the I2P network are usable. Each of these is pretty minor on its own, but adds up to a difficult experience for the average, non-enthusiast computer user.

Might as well torrent over I2P. Probably has more content and better speeds.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Torrents over i2p in my experience reach 100-250kb/s (currently).

With people running more i2p nodes and more people seeding we will reach even greater heights!

If you want a decentralized search, set up a DHT crawler and build a db of millions of torrents in a week or two. If you want anonymity/legal protection, use a trusted VPN. I'm not sure I'd trust a random independent tor-like implementation, especially when the real tor is slow and has imperfect anonymity.

Tried it with some nyaa stuff. Good speeds, no letter ;) So far it works for me as i dont pay for a vpn.

I wish they chose IPFS instead of Bittorrent v1.

i think the best part of tribler is decentralized search it could be better but if torrent sites used it to distribute there torrents torrent sites could never be taken down.

HUH. has anyone here given it a shot?

I installed in on my machine from the software package manager. It doesn't have the feature to bind to a specific device (this is a must have for me so I can use my VPN without IP address leakage). I read a horror story on hacker news about a person getting fragmented CSAM on their hard drive by running an exit node (running an exit node is trivially easy with the program). Noped out after not being able to bind to tun0. I went to their website, mostly academics polishing research papers from my point of view. Sketchy looking ui, uninstalled.