Preface: I wrote this tutorial for two reasons. More people should learn torrenting, and I want people to listen to my album.
What is torrenting?
Torrenting is a distributed file sharing system that basically lets you have really fast upload and download speeds if there’s enough people. All the people sharing amongst each other is called a swarm. There’s three types of users of a torrent that are commonly referred to: seeds, peers, and leeches.
Seeds - These are the people that have the whole file and are now sharing it with other people.
Peers - These are people that are uploading and downloading the file. They have a partial version of the file, but because torrenting shares files in pieces, they can start sharing pieces once they have them.
Leeches - These are people that download the file and then just turn off their torrenting program and don’t share. Don’t be these people.
How to start
I’d recommend starting with qBitTorrent. It’s easy to use, and right now is the gold standard in torrenting software, as far as I know. Additionally, your OS might have an actively maintained package for it, so look for that first! You’ll also need a VPN. I’m using Mullvad VPN for this guide.
Opsec
One thing to remember about torrenting is that it is a peer to peer network. This means that your computer will be directly connecting to others. Other computers will see the IP address that you’re torrenting on. Commonly, ISPs will detect torrenting and I’ve heard of users being sent legal letters telling them to stop torrenting copyrighted content. If you’re able to mask your IP and tunnel your traffic somewhere else, your ISP should not pick up on it. I’m basically describing a VPN.
This is the most important step.
Make sure you configure qBitTorrent to tunnel all your torrenting traffic through a VPN. I have no idea if you can split traffic, but honestly I wouldn’t risk leaking traffic. When going into qBitTorrent, make sure to navigate to Tools > Preferences > Advanced. From there, one of the first options lets you choose a network interface. If you are using Mullvad VPN, it should show up as a network interface.
If you don’t do this, you can leak traffic if you turn your VPN off before qBitTorrent, or if there’s some I/O error between qBitTorrent and your networking and it just switches to non-VPN networking. This ensures that all traffic goes through your VPN. This also means that if you turn your VPN off while torrenting, qBitTorrent will not be able to access the network because it’s restricted to VPN traffic. Sounds simple, but I speak from experience.
Actually torrenting
In order to actually torrent, you need a torrent file or a link. This tells the program where the swarm is. I’m providing a torrent file here. It’s an album that I made recently, but it’s completely free and meant to be distributed via torrent! For qBitTorrent, there’s a plus sign in the top left. Once you click that, you can choose a file and start torrenting!
Make sure to properly configure the path that the torrent/s will be stored. It’s easier to keep torrents separate from downloads. Once you’re done downloading a file, make sure to keep your program up! You can see what your torrenting ratio is (how much you’ve contributed back). Different communities can have different guidelines for what an acceptable ratio is. Make sure you figure that out before closing your torrenting program, lest you become a leech.
Something I recently realized I can do that might be relevant to someone: if your VPN client has a “Local network sharing” option in the settings, that can be used to connect to your torrenting machine without turning the VPN on and off every time. I torrent into a shared drive and also use that machine to run other (local network) servers, so this is really useful. If it doesn’t have such an option, maybe there is still a way to enable non-vpn connections from the ip range of your local network.