this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Port forwarding, which Mullvad was allowing until recently, allows other people to connect to your bittorrent client that is downloading/seeding torrents. This makes it easier for you to find others who can either help you download, or seed for other users in the network.
Basically it improves download speeds and allows you to easily upload to everyone else.
I see, thanks for clarifying! Even without port-forwarding, I'm able to make some connections. Is there just a more limited set of destination IPs I'm able to connect to? What dictates whether or not I'm able to connect?
Yes! You still get to make outgoing connections to anybody who can accept incoming connections.
Port forwarding makes it so you can accept incoming connections.
Oh also for your last question: Firewalls and NAT. NAT stands for network address translation. NAT is what these services use for getting people to 'share' ip addresses in a pool and then map ports to each person/host. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation
Interesting. So when I'm connecting to peers for downloading, these connections can be initiated in both ways? And since I'm not currently port-forwarding, this means I can only actively find peers, rather than passively accepting incoming connections?
That's exactly correct!
Cool, I learned something today! Thanks :)
Read this article - https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/
Maybe one day ipv6 will allow direct connections again, but I get the feeling that ISPs will still disallow new inbound connections by default.