For those curious why it matters, torrent is built around downloading a file from multiple other people (called seeders) in little pieces, then you become a seeder yourself when you have the whole file and send pieces to other people that want the same file(s). Without port forwarding you become just a leech, you can download but can't send pieces of the file to other people which isn't in the spirit of torrenting (hence the term leechers)

i don't have one on hand, but it's a physical letter sent through the mail which basically says "delete the copyrighted data we think you downloaded or we're shutting off your internet"

Yeah it’s honestly ridiculous that people still torrent. Usenet is by far the better solution, faster, easier, more automated etc.

For me using realdebrid to stream with Kodi, Streamio etc even better.

So, how do you hide your IP from the peers?

The very first thing the person you're replying to said was "Use a VPN..."

Well, yeah. Private network sysadmins tend to act like a big hammer. Torrents can be terrible on a network, particularly Linux distro torrents, especially if the hardware itself was put together on a shoestring budget. That said, a lot of universities are mirrors and there isn't really a need to go outside the university network to obtain that stuff. Not all the time, though.

is it true that you can see who downvoted you on lemmy?

Out of the box no, but if you host a Lemmy server you can check in the SQL database who downvoted what, both locally and all posts that were synced using ActivityPub.

Generally there is a centralized "tracker" that creates a torrent on the fly specifically for your user. I've you load the torrent and connect to the tracker via sometime like transmission or rtorrent or deluge, the tracker provides you with a list of peers (as far as I understand it). There's usually some settings you need to change on your torrent tool, like disarming different, DHT, etc - the sure usually has instructions for beginners. The communication between you and your peers is encrypted, so deep packet inspection at the ISP level is not possible. It also significantly reduces, but not eliminates, the risk a particular torrent is a honeypot.

I've been doing this for 20 years and I've never received a notice about torrenting from my ISPs. However, people I know that got stuff from open places like Pirate Bay and the like did get notices. The difference being I always used private trackers.

Also, government reach is infinite. If you're using them Internet, the government has your traffic. This isn't a conspiracy, it's a real thing. Go look up Room 641a.

Most people understand the word "private tracker" as a website like piratebay which you can only enter if someone else invites you. It often involves a requirement to seed some amount back into the network.

There are some names of known private trackers out there, there are ways to get an invite, sometimes it even involves something as simple as a donation (that's how I got in, currently sitting on the leaderboard for amount of data seeded). Once you've entered one private tracker, there's also easy ways to enter others, since you show credibility and commitment.

I think that sums it up nicely.