There was a lot of backlash a week or two ago when Mullvad announced that they would stop supporting port forwarding, as it seems like many people who were using Mullvad for torrenting were doing so because of the support for port forwarding. I'm still using Mullvad even though I don't port forward, but most of my torrenting is done through a separate seedbox.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't get the port forwarding issue. If I'm torrenting something on port 78660 but my only outgoing ports visible to others is port 8081, then couldn't I just tell my torrent software to use port 8081?

I don't really understand how torrenting is impacted by this, unless all torrent clients use a baked in port number (which from what I've seen over the last few decades, all torrent clients allow you to change the outgoing port)

[–] mammut@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Outgoing ports aren't the issue. At least one client involved in the transfer must have a port available that does not filter out incoming traffic. That means you can still download and upload even without a forwarded point, but you can only upload and download from people with forwarded ports. If you have port forwarding, you can download and upload with everybody.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You lost me in that middle part. Are there any further resources I can read to understand this better?

[–] mammut@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably this discussion explains it better than I did.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Oh I see!

Without port forwarding, you are a passive node that can only interact with active nodes but not other passive nodes.
With port forwarding, you are an active node that can interact with everyone (active + passive).
Passive nodes can upload/download but from fewer peers (only active nodes)
Active nodes can upload/download but from everyone