PSA: you may not need a VPN at all, depending on your country or your ISP.
Comment on Why I Ditched Spotify, and How I Set Up My Own Music Stack
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThe absolute basics:
- Install qbittorrent
- Install a VPN and run it so that all your Internet traffic goes down it
- Open a Web browser and search for top torrent sites 2025. There are articles with lists of the big ones.
- Go to a torrent site and search for what you want.
- Download the .torrent file and open it in qbit torrent Or copy the magnet link and paste that into qbittorrent
Always use the VPN when searching and downloading.
There are lots of steps to make it more convenient - things like using a Virutal machine so the vpn and torrent do their thing while you do whatever else you want on your PC, or setting up a docker Servarr stack to make things more convenient, or setting up a Raspberry pi as a servarr stack. But for the basics all you need is a torrent client, a VPN and a Web browser.
Scrollone@feddit.it 3 weeks ago
Psythik@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If you’re going to pay money to pirate, you might as well skip the VPN and qbittorrent and just get a Debrid service instead. This gets you direct downloads to any torrent at gigabit speeds, without having to wait for seeds. Debrid takes the torrent client completely out of the picture.
All you do is copy and paste the magnet link into the Debrid site, and then directly download the torrent from your browser. It’s cheaper and much faster than a VPN + torrent client. And safer too because your ISP doesn’t see you sharing any illegal content (seeding the files is how they get you) nor using a VPN, so you can still pirate in places where VPNs are illegal. They just see you downloading large files from the internet. And since you’re not distributing anything (seeding), you’re staying within the law in most jurisdictions.
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Downvotes are probably for your tone about VPNs.
VPNs are not a tool for piracy, they are a tool for privacy. Everyone should have a VPN like Mullvad/Proton or use Tor/I2P if they don’t want their private Internet searches uploaded to the US government to be scanned and scrutinized at will, and possibly sold and publicized, even criminalized. That goes for non Americans too.
nyctre@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
All that, plus the fact that if you’re gonna pirate, private trackers are better and safer. And in that case you need to seed. And besides, if everyone switches to debrid and nobody seeds anymore, who are you going to leech from?
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
This user unfortunately is not concerned with safety, yet. By the time they are I hope they aren’t in serious legal trouble.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Do they really say “Users personal data’s”?
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
😂 missed that, thanks for the laughs. Now I’m much more confident they handle my data with care!
bobzer@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I’m guessing you don’t seed then.
Psythik@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Of course not, because there’s nothing to seed when you’re downloading a file directly from a server. I thought I already explained this.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’m not “paying money to pirate”. I’m paying money for privacy, and filesharing is part of that. I would still be using a VPN even if everything I downloaded was public domain.