Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

VPNs are dirt cheap. How can you say you can't afford one? What is your budget, $0.50?

what is your budget? you say you can't afford a vpn, most vpns are roughly 71 yuan or 10 USD per month, with the option to buy at a large discount if purchased for the full year. tell your budget in your local currency... 10 dollars per month isn't very expensive, but these subscriptions do add up.

If you don’t have the money for a proper VPN provider, you definitely don’t have the money for a legal defense if it came to that. Save your money and only begin once you can afford reasonable protections.

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.

Use someone else's wifi.

I used to park my car in a Home Depot parking lot when I went to work with a laptop torrenting until the battery died.

this is like asking how to safely hook up with strangers at the bar if you can't afford condoms to help protect you from STIs. if you can't afford a VPN, you can't afford to get disconnected by your ISP for three strikes, let alone afford a settlement because some copyright troll logged your IP as a downloader. just don't do it until you can properly put some safeguards in place.

i2p.

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.

You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.

Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.

So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it's worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.

Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.

If you use private trackers, a VPN is irrelevant. All you need to do is fully encrypt your traffic in your torrent client so your ISP can't see what you're doing. It's been working just fine for me for 15 years, and I've never gotten a 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.

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.

I2p is slow and lacks selection but could work.

Borrowed WiFi is definitely your best bet. Find a place with a fast public WiFi network you can reach from your car.

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.

You could also consider looking into a private tracker. It’s not 100% safe but much more safe than a public tracker. It’s also kind of fun getting into it, but hard to get invited.

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

It's really that important in the USA? Asking from Europe, where Ivve never even heard of anyone getting fined.

An alternative that hasn't been presented yet.

Why not use less well known foreign public trackers? Rutracker has a stupid amount of content, including a lot of niche music content.

If you are worried about Rutracker being too well known, you can try Mazepa Torrent. This is only relevant for movies and shows. Their collection isn't as good as rutracker, but they have most new releases. While the default audio language is Ukrainian, English is always included (this would an issue for non-English language movies/shows, but English subtitles are usually included).

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.

Look at newsgroups - some indexers are free, others have a lifetime fee that's reasonable. I moved to nzbs and haven't looked back - I can't get dinged for sharing copyrighted stuff if I'm only downloading, never uploading.

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.

You can afford AirVPN 💜

I use Cloudflare Warp and make qbittorrent only able to torrent if it’s connected to Warp

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

There’s a few free vpn providers out there. You could do a little homework and see if they are a good option. I tend to mistrust free services like that (if I’m not paying, who is, and what are they paying for?), but if you’re in a pinch it’s something to research.

Another option is to look for deals. Sometimes VPN providers will have a super sale a few times a year. I think once I got a NordVPN subscription for THREE YEARS for like $60. It’s more expensive than a single month of anything, yes, but if you can afford a onetime expense it’s nice not to have to worry about a recurring monthly cost.

Your other option is to not use torrents. Usenet is still the grand daddy of file sharing and is pretty much anonymous. Most Usenet hosts are paid, but back in the day even ISPs ran their own servers. It could be worth looking and seeing if there’s any free or low cost providers there.