Before I say anything further, yes I know how much the recommended VPNs cost. I can read. Please do not interrogate me about it.
I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while, particularly contributing to private trackers related to music (and to a lesser extent retro games, though I don’t have much original stuff to put there as it’s harder to find rare games than rare music). FMHY recommends RiseUp if I must get a free VPN while I’m working on my financial situation, though I’m not sure whether it’s been tested in court. What are my options, if any?
What are the adoption rates of those compared to a standard private tracker?
Dunno, I haven’t used private trackers in 10 years. You can add any magnet link to Tribler and it will go through exit nodes to hide your IP, kind of like Tor does for browsing clearnet. I haven’t used i2p in a while either; back then, I used the Postman tracker, and don’t know if that’s still what most people do or not. I personally just use a paid VPN, because there really isn’t a good way to set Tribbler up with an *arr stack.