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Is StormyCloud the only I2P outproxy?
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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stormycloud is the biggest, there's also acetone and purokishi that are both very reliable. there's a couple others that aren't as stable right now. i2p's about inter-network services that often work without any need of the clearnet, tor is a better option if you're looking to do clearnet things.
torrents don't get bridged through the (mainly 3!) outproxies in i2p. they're bridged by random people cross-seeding torrents through clients like qbittorrent or bigly bt which work in both i2p and clearnet. Or, you can download a torrent from clearnet normally and change the trackers to i2p only trackers, then add to i2psnark. In both cases using biglybt/qbittorrent you should be able to connect to peers from i2p and clearnet through the people that do this, functioning as your own outproxy in a way.
Anyone can easily bring over clearnet torrents into i2p, and they are more than welcome to do so!
So i'm not disagreeing with you about i2p needing more outproxies, more is better, but tor does this already (and arguably does it better since there's so many exit nodes) so i don't think the demand is as big. You're right that it's pretty similar running an i2p proxy. As far as i know it's a very similar process running tor exit nodes vs i2p outproxy, i think acetone is also a tor exit node (i might be wrong on that), purokishi routes some things through tor, and stormycloud until somewhat recently mainly focused on running a fleet of tor exit nodes.
The nature of i2p means that to get faster speeds these providers may be running many i2p routers to provide lots of tunnels and load balance them, so i think that aspect is more technically challenging but i've never done it at scale myself. I think you'd need a handful of well resourced/connected i2p routers to offer a consistently good outproxy service.
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.