It depends on what trackers you’re on and how much storage you have, and how risk averse you are.

First of all, binding your torrent client to the VPN interface should prevent all leakage.

Additional precautions like running your torrent client behind a container like gluetun should make it pretty much impossible to leak your IP to adversaries. Or if you have a plain Linux server, running the torrent client in it’s own network namespace also achieves the same result.

The other big reason to get a seedbox is to be able to maintain your ratio. This depends on your tracker.

E.g. I have enough storage for a large enough seeding size and enought torrents to get sufficient bonus points. Combined with a bit of upload here and there, I get enough upload/buffer to snatch what I want.

On many trackers, large enough torrents are often freeleech, so they don’t count towards the download stat anyway.

tl;dr

If you bound your torrent client to the VPN, I’d seed with your NAS unless you don’t get enough upload to maintain your ratio on your specific private trackers. Storage is way cheaper on your NAS.

Semi-private just refers to how easy it is to join them. E.g. rutracker is considered a semi-private tracker, because it requires an account, but always allows registrations and does not enforce any ratio.

In that sense I was wrong in calling TL a semi-private tracker, because TL does require maintaining a ratio. But given it is possible to simply join via their seedbox offerings, it is not as private as some other trackers, which require proofs of good behaviour on other trackers and/or an application process.

Edit: Public: no registration required
Semi-private: registration required, but always possible; lax ratio rules
Private: registration required, mostly through invites/applications; anti-leech ratio rules

There’s a continuously updated list of german private trackers [1].

AnimeWorld is the best german anime tracker and is currently open until the end of the year.

Immortuos is the best tracker with continously open applications, but they require solid proof of known good trackers.

TFA does not require as much proof and requests get filled quickly.

BTF, WoT are impossible to get into. TS has really strict requirements, but they do take applications.

Also, there’s no invite route like on many english “cabal” trackers.

Otherwise, usenet has more german content than TFA (and other lower tier trackers). The usenet board FileLeechers will be open from 2024-12-31 16:00 to 2025-01-01 02:00. For automation (arr*) SceneNZBs is the german usenet indexer.

PS: Remember to bind your torrent client to the VPN interface, if you want to use one.

[1] https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?35824-Liste-aktueller-deutscher-Torrent-Tracker-V2

Semi-private trackers like TorrentLeech are a great step up from public trackers and they are relatively easy to join (e.g. seedbox promo). More content is available and well-seeded for longer periods of time.

It’s not difficult to keep your ratio, even with a 50MBit/s connection (torrents > 15GB are freeleech anyway), as long as you seed 24/7. Or buy a seedbox for a while, build a few TB of buffer (autobrr) and never worry again.

Edit: Usenet is great because it’s fast, and depending on your (non-english) language, it’s a completely different league than public trackers. But I’d argue for english content TL (and a few others) is good enough.

With I2P each user is a node/router, so it does not rely on central nodes like Tor.

The only issue is it’s slow, because most users don’t allocate/have much bandwidth. Because of it’s garlic routing (similar to Tor’s onion routing) traffic is encrypted multiple times with multiple hops which also impacts throughput and latency.

The good thing is it’s already suppported by qBittorrent (and BiglyBT), but setting it up is a manual process.

Also, qBittorrent doesn’t support DHT over I2P yet, so it’s necessary to use an i2p tracker like tracker2.postman.i2p.

But that would be pretty easy to squash, wouldn’t it? I mean a network only set up for piracy, it will get it’s main operators taken down pretty fast.

As long as there’s reasonable doubt that i2p is only used for piracy, it shouldn’t get blocked. Similarly, Tor isn’t only used for trading drugs, so it mustn’t get blocked by democracies.

Yes, that’s how it is. If you look at the commit history of yuzu, there’s basically only documentation changes. [1]

The joke about the Hydra many heads is just not true for software projects where only actually capable developers are able to meaningfully contribute. And those most likely already have a well paying job. Getting sued by Nintendo isn’t on anyones bucket list.

[1] https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu/commits/branch/dev

Sounds an awful lot like a piracy tax…

It’s pretty similar. The difference is that it only exists for legal private copies, not for generally illegal piracy.

We pay this tax on any device which can store bits, it’s not just some storage mediums.

That’s also the case in Germany (and likely most of Europe). The actual rate depends on the product category.

I don’t know about your piracy tax specifically, but there’s also a tax on any storage media, printers etc. in Germany.

The “Urheberrechtsabgabe” (copyright duty) is not about paying for pirate copies, but it’s a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy. A private copy is e.g. a copy of a CD I own in case the original gets destroyed. It’s explicitly not allowed to share them.

Sadly the right to a private copy gets canceled as soon as it’s necessary to break a “working” copy protection. CD copy protection has been broken for decades, but it still counts as a “working” copy protection. Thus a private copy is practically not possible legally, but we still pay this tax on any storage media… I really hate the copyright lobby.

A “great” thing about copyright infringement in Germany is that the statue of limitations only starts after the copyright holder learns from the copyright infringement.

This means, even if I torrented a movie 5 years ago, and the copyright holder finds out my name only now, they’d still have another 3 years to sue me.

Anyway, there’re private torrent sites in Germany. It’s only public sites that don’t exist.

DDL and streaming sites are really big in Germany. Usenet too, but until a few years ago I don’t think there were Indexers with API’s, so it’s been either manual downloading or streaming.