Thanks for the question. So Lemmy does support downvotes but I've decided to disable them on this instance. The reason is just that I don't like seeing downvotes and I don't really see the point in them. I think rule-breaking content should be reported and outside of that what people usually do is use downvotes to signal that they disagree with someone. I saw a good discussion on this elsewhere on Lemmy not that long ago but for now I'd rather keep them disabled unless there is a really good reason.

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.

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 [email protected] 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.

Oh I'm not worried at all. We'll grow slowly but I'm just excited to experience it along the way too. I should have required applications before this happened but I wanted to make it easy for new folks to get in.

A good thing about this instance is that we're federated with everyone and so we can freely access anybody's instance. Large instances like beehaw have deferated now with other people so their users are unable to view or interact with content on those instances.

I'll try to keep us open with everyone, which was one of my concerns with the bots. They could misbehave on other instances and make us look bad.

Anyway, small instances are fun too for those reasons. I continue to mention our communities every once in a while on other platforms so we can gradually grow as well.

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.

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.

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 : )

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.

This is hilarious. Thank you hahahahah.

That's exactly correct!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.