Since IVPN and Mullvad are both phasing out port forwarding, are there any alternatives? I am not looking for something like NordVPN which is a privacy nightmare. AirVPN is also not private enough considering I’ve seen reports online of ISPs sending out DMCA letters of gold to its users.
I suspect ProtonVPN will remove port forwarding soon enough. Mullvad had valid concerns with removing port forwarding, and I expect the industry to agree. I’m not sure what the answer to this problem is.
They literally just launched portforwarding on proton vpn this year
Hi, check this comment. It seems like it will be able to work without the concerns that Mullvad has had. I suppose in theory the bad actors can use a synchronized scheme like this as well - if they realize that, ProtonVPN may still end up with the same amount of problems and need to shut it down.
Some people here are saying i2p may be the future https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/259433 Sounds like Qbittorrent is planning to provide i2p support too. So hopefully port forwarding won’t matter as much for future releases.
The main issue with I have with how the current i2p implementation works is that it essentially creates a walled garden in the torrent network, as i2p users can’t seed out to non-i2p users, they can only leech from them. I feel like that would needlessly split the network, which relies on having as many people as possible seeding. Frankly I don’t know if its even possible to work around that, but I’ll need to see how it plays out. Also, there needs to be at least one person with a port forwarded on any given torrent. utp only peers cannot seed independently, from my understanding.
I think i2p or something similar where people can run a router and provide bandwidth to the network and help hide what other users are downloading (which is how i2p works but its not super fast sadly)
I don’t have much familiarity with i2p, but is it possible for private trackers to switch to i2p all at once and alleviate this problem? With public torrents you have to rely on the masses to shuffle to i2p, but with a private tracker it’s a lot easier to just tell your users “hey we’re using this now.”
Would a real i2p switch cause any notable downsides? I see people mentioning slower speeds but I’m not sure if they’re conflating inherent protocol slowness with smaller swarm sizes during initial adoption.
Does anyone have any recommended resources on this topic?
I saw someone say that Proton implemented their port forwarding in a different way than Mullvad that negates a lot of the issues that caused them to axe it
Hi, I looked into this and from what I can gather, ProtonVPN gives out temporary ports for port forwarding. I’m not 100% how long these ports are leased for, but as long as you run a script like this to move your torrent client’s port around to match ProtonVPN’s, I can see how this would work. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable. I wonder if Mullvad will implement something like this to achieve parity.
Yeah that sounds right. I use Proton and the ports are randomly assigned when you connect. I just manually put the port in qbittorrent each time, it’s not too much trouble.
I’m very interested in reading about that if you remember where you saw it. If true, it makes me wonder why Mullvad/IVPN couldn’t go that route?
ProtonVPN’s port forwarding works different than Mullvad (and IVPN) though. You don’t get a static port, it’s randomly assigned and can periodically change. Also not all of ProtonVPN’s endpoints support port forward (most notably none of the US ones do). This sort of mitigates the problem since it’s difficult to host a site through the VPN since you’d have to always be telling people your new port whenever it changes. This is fine for torrent use though, if you’re using a client like deluge where you can inform the client of a new port through the API when it changes.