A lot many individuals run TOR exit nodes, but I never hear about people running their own I2P outproxies. Is it really hard to host, or is there some other reason? I thought that if you could run a TOR exit node I’d think you’d be just fine running an I2P outproxy.
Running more outproxies will help in bridging torrents from the clearnet to I2P, which would be a very good move considering the crackdowns on torrents right now. Companies even want to involve civilians into their lawsuits in Sweden now, making the need for privacy/anonymity even more important when torrenting, which I2P provides.
i remember reading that tor maintainers don’t like it when people use the Tor network for torrenting, because it harms the network from a performance perspective
100% right, tor is not for torrenting, tor for clearnet i2p for torrenting, not for clearnet
yeah, and more generally, Tor is optimized for light services both in-network and through outproxies (because there are many of those), and I2P is more optimized for large transfers and many connections in-network, and very unsuitable for internet access because there’s only a few overwhelmed outproxies, among which load is not even attempted to be distributed by the default I2P router configuration.
the reason for why I2P is more suitable for torrenting is unclear to me, though, other than the maintainers telling that. possibly because almost everyone who wants to use the network will participate actively in routing traffic, and so there is relatively a lot more routers than on Tor
Yeah, accessing the outernet was sort of an afterthought with i2p, although the proxies are handling well now…things got way better after stormy cloud came on the scene imo. you can stream clearnet videos through the 3 i mentioned. It could be better if there was outproxy switching built in like tor, i think. It was bad though before stormy cloud and often unusable, the available outproxies were very much overwhelmed. sometimes they worked but it was hit or miss.
that’s the right line of thinking. vast majority of tor users don’t contribute to the network which is held together by a comparatively small number of volunteers. by default if you’re running i2p you’re contributing (except with specific configurations). With tor, more users, same number of nodes means less bandwidth for everyone. With i2p more users means both sides go up, more nodes, more bandwidth, on average more bandwidth for everyone. Torrenting burns bandwidth but on average more users grows network capacity.
honestly that’s still my experience. it’s not rare that websites like a DDG results page does not even load, I think from time to time I even have unable to connect errors, even though as I have stormycloud as my outproxy. probably something on my end, though, it seems then
I haven’t used stormycloud much but i haven’t heard there being issues with them. I’ve preferred using outproxy.acetone.i2p and purokishi.i2p since i’ve found them consistently to be faster. Stormycloud is the default in vanilla i2p so they end up getting the brunt of i2p’s outproxy traffic, it’s possible they could get overloaded. They have a very good setup, but they’re one entity.
Especially right now after mental outlaws video, more routers could be coming online and giving stormycloud a workout, maybe getting overwhelmed. I would try switching to either of those and setting inbound/outbound tunnel count to 16. hope that helps.
I’ll try this, thanks. but to fill in some missing context from my part, this is what I have been experiencing for the little more than a year I’m running an I2P router.