Honest question, why would you need a VPN if you want to download from private trackers?

Usually, copyright owners target people on public trackers and on the DHT. Not a problem if you only get into private trackers.

If you can share the cost of a VPN with one or more other people (most allow multiple devices to connect at the same time), it’ll be much cheaper. Or if you can’t afford that either, try to find someone who will let you use theirs for free. Maybe you can even find someone who isn’t tech savvy who will pay you a few bucks a month to cover the VPN in exchange for you downloading Linux ISOs for them.

Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.

Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.

I would prioritize a VPN ahead of an ISP. Free Open/Public APs are not uncommon in my area.

Use torrent over ipfs. Qbittorrent can do it.

Find a friend in a less shit place you can proxy through.

I use proton and our local laundry-mats; they have open WIFI…and you can get your laundry done while waiting for the torrent to finish

use tor

Tribler or i2p.

Edit: there are also non-bittorrent p2p networks out there like Retroshare, but I haven’t used them, so don’t know how useful they are.

Its being a while for me but windscribe and seedr had totally usable free tiers

I don’t usually recommend this, but since you are in a situation where you really can’t afford a VPN or a seedbox and live in a country where torrenting is prosecuted then I think that grants a free pass to abuse the tor network a bit and torrent over tor.

There are some guides online on now to route the traffic, note that it’s very easy to leak traffic if you don’t know what you’re doing. Look for a good guide . I’m guessing the safest way to do it is by using Whonix.

If going that route avoid downloading big torrents if you can find smaller ones or try to search for direct downloads first.

And also, I don’t usually say this, but, avoid seeding. Yes leeching is bad, but saturating tor is probably worse I think.

I would suggest don’t.

For downloading, look at DDL sites.

For uploading, if you can’t do it safely, don’t. Stash it all, make backups, keep it until you can do it safely.

RiseUp is slow and intended for activists and the politically vulnerable. It’s not for poor people who cannot afford a $5 a month VPN. You will be fucking over people with much more legitimate use cases than yours if you start using it for torrenting.

I been using torrents since they became a good option a little over twenty years ago. I’ve torrented using public and all manner of private trackers both with and without vpn or tor.

I have received letters from various ISPs during those years. Here’s what it all boils down to:

What’s most important: turn off peer exchange and dht, turn on require encryption.

What’s also important: only use private trackers.

What’s less important, but good to have: use a vpn with port forwarding with your client bound to its interface. It doesn’t matter if you don’t bind the client to the vpn interface so make sure you do that.

E: just read through the comments on your native instance that don’t show up to me normally. There’s some old misinformation going around still. I’m not gonna argue or go into great detail but things like only leeching, only using foreign trackers or using someone else’s WiFi don’t do anything to help you avoid some kind of letter.

I mean you can avoid all that. If you’re just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.

Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it’s all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.