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

Ebikes are definitely the answer. Much easier to ride up hills and very accessible for regular people to start riding. Plus they are significantly cheaper than cars when you account for insurance and registration and maintenance, etc.

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.

It just works

I just started a small instance called wizanons.dev if anyone is interested in joining. We're focused on magic and mysticism, especially psychonautics.

Also super friendly and we've yet to ban any instances since we're still small and haven't to. We run the "magic" community, which is mostly general for anything magical - fantasy or otherwise anyone wants to post about.

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 figured this would be his last one honestly. He's already made it, so to speak.

This is awesome! I love seeing the whole community here like this!

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.

I'm also extremely excited about this. Growing lemmy into a thriving community of people across many different instances is the best part about it. I'm hopeful that we have the dev talent required to build interfaces that can highlight that feature.

Also being able to point to lemmy and say "go here for a better experience" is gonna be fantastic every time when Reddit continues to kill their platform.

Very interesting! Thanks for running the survey and sharing the results.

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 use btrfs snapshots and btrbk

btrfs is a great filesystem and btrbk complements it easily. Switching between snapshots is also really easy if something goes wrong and you need to restore.

Archwiki docs for btrfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Incremental_backup_to_external_drive

Of course you'd still want a remote location to backup to. You can use an encrypted volume with cloud storage. So google drive, etc all work.

That's exactly correct!

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.

100% agree with this. Ever since getting into shrooms the world has become so much more alive and I feel far better about life in general. I run a community for magic and mysticism if anyone is interested called !magic@wizanons.dev which focuses on this type of discussion. Anyone is welcome to join the discussion or ask questions.

See this is actually the crazy part to me. Not making more than one game at a time. Why didn't they just give these IPs to another team, or have some employees switch gears onto this project, or anything else they could have done to get some parallelism going on here.

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).

For anyone looking for 1TB - 2TB drives I'd recommend the Micron 2400 2TB SSD: https://www.newegg.com/micron-2tb-2400-series/p/0D9-0022-000N1?Item=0D9-0022-000N1

It also has low power like the corsair and it is at a cheap price at $162.

I've had great experiences with it so far. Runs great.

This is hilarious. Thank you hahahahah.

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

Great to have you here Chris. And thanks for creating this wonderful community. Feels like the old web again in some way, which is a good thing.

Same but on a Pixel 6a. It's good for the most part. I don't use this phone for calls/sms so I wish I could just disable that while retaining mobile data, but I haven't figured that out yet really.

This sounds like a great idea but I'm wondering if this is best to go into the UI of an app, for instance. Making the lists of multi-subreddits easily sharable would be a big plus, that way it isn't just one person who controls who is allowed into the multi-subreddit.

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.

I was interested in trying NixOS before after many years of Linux experience but I couldn't understand what advantages it had over my current setup. It just mostly seemed more complicated than it needed to be for little to no gain.

The reproducibility aspect of it can be achieved on other Linux platforms or in other environments so it wasn't a big draw for me. I already have backups too. Making it easily deployable seems like the same use case as for instance, docker, which is available everywhere already.

I love projects like this though so I fully support it!

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.

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

Todd's Sweet Little Lies

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's worked well enough for me. Keep in mind this is just for public trackers. Private trackers shouldn't be used with a VPN anyway and you don't need to use i2p for them.

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 : )

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.