Yes, it is not as decentralised as you have thought. I thought this is a fairly known fact. If you need something truly decentralized, I2P is probably the way.
We need to collect the list of names of every politican and such who has advocated for this. These humans are dangerous to society, and we need to be on the lookout regarding what are they doing next. We also need to raise awareness about them so that given the chance, they can be removed from positions of power.
Currently BiglyBt supports I2P and it has been that way for quite some time.
If you use qBittorrent, I2P support will come in version 4.6. you can try it out now with the published release candidate version. Probably other clients are working on it too as the support is coming from the libtorrent programming library, which is used by other clients too.
Right now, I2P is quite slow in my experience, in terms of loading I2P websites. I hope that it’s just a misconfiguration on my part, or that these specific sites I tried are just overloaded.
ext4 certainly has its place, it’s a fine default file system, there’s really no problems with it.
But others, like ZFS and BTRFS, have features that you may want to use, but ext4 doesn’t do: fs snapshots, data compression, built in encryption (to a degree, usually only happening for data and some of the metadata, so LUKS is often better IMHO), checking for bitrot and restoring it when possible (whether it is depends on your config), quotas per user group or project, spanning multiple disks like with RAID but safer (to a degree), and others.
In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.
I don’t think that it makes LUKS obsolete. LUKS encrypts the entire partition, but ZFS (and BTRFS too as I know) only encrypt the data and some of the metadata, the rest is kept as it is.
Data that is not encrypted can be modified from the outside (the checksums have to be updated of course), which can mean from a virus on a dual booted OS to an intruder/thief/whatever.
If you have read recently about the logofail attack, the same could happen with modifying the technical data of a filesystem, but it may be bad enough if they just swap the names of 2 of your snapshots if they just want to cause trouble.
Immich is a selfhosted photo management server with a user interface that’s similar to google photos. Also has mobile apps.
Their motto is “privacy should not be a luxury”.
I was planning for long to try it out because it looks very promising, but I was waiting for… I don’t know what? Fuck it I’m installing it today.
Well, yeah, about the speed… it’s not fast. And probably never will be fast as plain internet. Just imagine what is happening: each service you connect to is usually 6 hops away, which in the worst case (where each pair of peers is the furthest possible from each other) would require traffic to take 3 rounds between e.g. west asia and the usa. Here’s an other explanation with a diagram: geti2p.net/en/faq#slow
But that’s just the latency, and it can be tuned. If you want to play online games with a group of people over I2P, you could use for instance a 1-hop tunnel, and ask the others too to use a 1-hop tunnel, and now it’s totally different. Of course this hurts your and the other players anonymity, but it could be acceptable, especially if you make it select a router relatively close to you.
Bandwidth is again a different topic, I think that could improve even without sacrificing on the tunnel length, with more (relatively) high bandwidth routers joining the network, but of course your tunnel’s bandwidth will always be limited by the slowest router in the chain. Fortunately there are ways to have a tunnel through more performant routers.
On how does it work: when you start up your router (a software package, through which other programs can use the network), it asks a bunch of preconfigured servers about known I2P peers, through a process called reseeding. Afaik there are currently 12 preconfigured reseed servers, but you can bring your own, or if you know someone with an I2P router who you trust, they can make a reseed file for you which you can import.
After that, your router will talk to the other routers it now knows about, and ask them too about the routers they know.
This means that it’s better (while not necessary) to have a dedicated machine on which a router is always running and online, instead of having it run for the 30 minutes every time you power on your desktop. It doesn’t have to be powerful, it can be a low power consumption SBC (like a raspberri pi or similar), and I think it’s also possible to set up an unused android phone for this purpose with an app, but you probably don’t want it to use your mobile data plan.
On why is it better for torrenting: I don’t remember the details on that.
What I remember is that it’s often said that the protocol was “built for that”.
But there’s also another thing: vandwitdh is naturally less of a scarcity here, compared to Tor. Connecting to the network requires the use of a “router”, which besides giving access to it for you, also automatically contributes to the network with your internet connection’s bandwidth capacity (except if limited by the tech of your ISP, like with CGNAT; it can still contribute some but usually it’s less), and in turn most users will provide a “relay” to the network. On the Tor network, most users are just users, their clients are not participating in routing the traffic of other users, and so they are only consuming the capacity provided by others.
Also, afaik torrenting on Tor always needs to make use of an exit node to access the tracker and all the peers, while on I2P it all happens inside the network, without placing a huge load on outproxies (exit nodes in I2P terms)
It may seem that I2P has a bunch of downsides, and it may discourage you from using it, but let me tell you how I think about it.
I don’t use it for everything, just as I don’t use the Tor network on a daily basis, but when I need it it’s there, it makes me easier to search on a few private matters, and it runs in the background so I’m basically effortlessly helping the other users, when not counting the initial setup and the electricity costs of course (the former was not much, and the latter does not depend on this in my case)