I am not in a place where I can afford a VPN (do not start suggesting cheap VPNs to me istg), and in addition, you have to place a lot of trust in the VPN. Tribler seems promising, except... For the giant disclaimer that's been on the site for years. That worries me. I am quite worried about getting scary letters from my ISP or something when torrenting.
Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature.
Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.
Edit: Seems like there are a lot of issues below the surface as well... https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19118584/10120234
And Lokinet, I2P, and GNUnet have their own massive problems... https://comment.ctrl.blog/discussion/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent
ngl, kinda depressing that it's like this...
Edit 2: I misread the article a bit, it's not quite as dire as I thought it was initially, but the warning and the fact that only the core file-transferring features are anonymized at all... Is a bit disconcerting.
i2p is the only tor for torrents I know of. a program i2psnark that comes with the java-version preinstalled specifically. You need to follow their setup instructions closely to get a functioning i2p you can interact with using a http-proxy setting in your web-browser.
This is a bit of the chicken and egg problem. Has anyone here experience using or seeding i2p torrents? I would be interested in for example seeding Linux iso. I set it up
My 2cents how to seed :
But sharing over it is another matter; you need a tracker for that, like postman, or the other one I have not tested yet.
I've used I2P for torrents and it's fine. There's plenty of popular stuff on Postman. The speeds are slower partly to the network but partly due to number of seeders, so I encourage everyone to get on there. Just be patient and there's no problem.
I2P works fine, qBittorrent supports it now too. There are earlier posts in this community discussing it.
Like you said it's mostly a popularity problem, less users = less seeds/peers.