this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They literally just launched portforwarding on proton vpn this year

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.