I2P and it's sub 100 kb/s speed? Series, games would never finish downloading, but then also only those torrents are accessible through I2P that are published to an I2P tracker, there is no DHT (yet?). Clearnet torrents and clearnet peers are not accessible through I2P.

Or is it something on my end that makes it that slow? ISP download bandwidth is stable and much higher.

[–] Staubsaugernasenmann@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

While it's true that i2p torrents are slower than clearnet torrents the speed is not really as bad in my experience. I would say i can download most shows, movies and files in general in 1-2 days max (I know that is slow in comparison, but its OK if you are just building up your library, atleast for me). On average i would say a "normal 1080p movie" finishes in 5-6 hours (In my experience). The bigger Problem is sometimes the lack of torrents and seeders, although this is getting better

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago

1-2 days is slow but acceptable I think. It's a compromise.

But for some reason for me it's much slower, even though I run a router that participates in routing and usually has 50+ or even 3 digit share ratios, with ~80 GB traffic a day in both directions, so it must be integrated well.

Now I realized I have only tried a single I2P torrent yet, and it was just 2 MB, and my experience was coming from both i2p sites and outproxies often being very slow or unreachable with the common tunnel settings.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The total speed of my torrents has been 200KB/s, once even got 300KB/s. Honestly, that's not a problem for me; I'm not hooked and don't need an instant fix.

It's also logical that I2P can't access the clearnet. That's not the purpose of I2P. Theoretically there can be inproxies and outproxies, but AFAIK very few people operate them. Having an outproxy is like operating a TOR exit node.

Speed is side-effect of anonymity. The more people you route a request through, the slower it gets. It's at least as slow as the slowest link. A VPN is one single, high speed link, but it doesn't grant you anonymity (if the VPN provider collects logs). IINM you need at least 2 hops to be anonymous. A - B - C, B doesn't know if A is the source or just forwarding a request nor if C is the final destination or just another hop.

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[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

At a measly 200kb/s it would have taken me more than 200 days of constant downloading at "full speed" to build my media library to were it is now (3.6tb), instead of a few days...that's not about instant fix IMO, that's just super duper slow. Few (no?) people need true anonymity for torrenting, just enough to not be indisputably linked to it so they can't take you to court.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I dunno how old you are, but I come from the time of internet where loading pictures happen line by line. It took me a decade or more to get my library.

I'm patient. I don't need my stuff to be there immediately. Maybe that's the minority, I dunno, but a little bit of anonymity and patience ain't hurt nobody.

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[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Old enough to have experienced the world before the internet was widely available in the "western" world. It's not about getting things instantly, but I'm also over waiting for a week+ just to download a movie. The level of anonymity that a good VPN provides is good enough for me.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev -1 points 5 months ago

That's cool. It's your choice. I'm cheap and patient, so it's all good.

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[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I wanted to search for the postman tracker's address, so went to check on notbob.i2p. website unreachable. Isn't this a relatively fairly popular site here?

Edit: on a second try it now loaded in ~10 seconds.
This latency is probably not to much of a problem, but two things:

the instability that it couldn't even start loading the site, and it's regularity
if a text site with few graphics takes this much time to transfer, bittorrent and movies will be even worse because that's often not compressible

[–] renard_roux@beehaw.org 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you have any links to articles about how to use i2p?

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago

After you install I2P you can download torrents with the built in I2PSnark or connect it to Qtorrent. Qtorrent now has I2P support.

Here's a video on how to use I2PSnark.

You can find torrents on http://tracker2.postman.i2p . You need to configure your browser to do.

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Are there I2P based IPTV services available?

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I doubt it. I2P is like TOR, but more optimised for P2P and has less users, so it's much slower (100-200KB/s on established connctions). But if the number of users grows, it may become much faster.

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 5 months ago

That's an interesting prospect. I would love to see that take shape.

[–] theroff@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The biggest issue I've had with I2P so far has been lack of content.

postman.i2p only permits torrents which includes its tracker in the torrent file, which means popular torrents from 1337x, TPB et al can't be uploaded there (at least not without changing the infohash). Torrent clients like qBittorrent and BiglyBT can cross-seed on I2P and clearnet networks which is a recent development since libtorrent 2.0 came out (software packages take a while to bump to.the latest library), but from what I've tested nearly all of the infohashes I put into my client from "clearnet" torrent sites have stalled, probably because I2P is a little too bespoke at the moment.

The potential is definitely there IMO, but unless you're just watching mainstream movies and TV it's not a replacement for clearnet/VPN.

If I'm missing something I'd like to know :)

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The info hash shouldn't change as per spec.

info_hash

The 20 byte sha1 hash of the bencoded form of the info value from the metainfo file. This value will almost certainly have to be escaped.

The info value is a separate key of a torrent file

metainfo files

Metainfo files (also known as .torrent files) are bencoded dictionaries with the following keys:

announce
The URL of the tracker.
info
This maps to a dictionary, with keys described below.

The info dictionary does not include the list of trackers, therefore the infohash shouldn't change.

The most likely reason your torrent stalls when running in I2P mode is probably that it doesn't exist on the tracker.

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[–] theroff@aussie.zone 2 points 5 months ago

I stand corrected, thank you. I'll have to try that out.