Chef K wrote: ↑17 May 2025 22:15
I thought adding a tracker meant adding whatever is on that front page so that I could search around and download without using the site.
You need to add something that is usually called "Announce URL" (or multiple of them). You add it/them to the "trackers" tab of each torrent you want to seed/download on i2p.
The thing is, what you usually see called as "tracker" (such as tracker2.postman.i2p in your web browser), is actually more a "content index / search / catalogue". Actual trackers are servers that accept special requests from torrent clients that "announce" their presence (and readiness to download/upload), and in turn clients get network addresses of other clients (peers) from the tracker.
Usually, torrent content catalogues also run their own tracker servers and have their Announce URLs. For example, Postman has it:
http://tracker2.postman.i2p/announce.php (don't open it in your browser, it's meaningless to do so).
Trackers are stored in the .torrent file, but outside of the "info" section - such that if you add/remove trackers, the identification of the torrent (the "infohash" doesn't change). The "info" section stores important information for downloading the torrent - file names, hashes of pieces (which are verified after download to ensure you downloaded the correct thing).
There are other ways to get peers: for example peer exchange, which works in addition to a tracker (can't work on its own), and DHT, which can serve as a decentralized replacement for trackers (but it's not implemented in qBittorent for i2p yet).
Adding multiple trackers to your torrent is usually done for redundancy. But all members of the torrent should use at least one same tracker, otherwise they won't be able to learn about all of each other (without measures like peer exchange or DHT). So there are a few popular trackers that you should add to your torrents (e.g. the default ones in i2psnark are Postman and DG2).
If you don't add any trackers to your torrent in your torrent client, and if your client doesn't support DHT (qBit does not support it for i2p), then your seeding will not be effective, as downloaders' clients would not be able to know that you're seeding, and won't know how to contact you (network address of torrent client). Your torrent client will just be sitting there, all alone, doing nothing useful.
Here's a list of public trackers (where you don't need signup to use them), along with their Announce URLs:
http://wiki.i2p-projekt.i2p/wiki/index. ... n_trackers
(Please note that these are *trackers*, not content catalogues, so they usually only assist torrent clients in finding peers).
Sometimes the wiki is down, so an alternative list is somewhere on discuss.i2p
Please note that Postman is (AFAIK) not an open tracker, you need to sign up and add your torrent to it, before your client is able to announce the torrent to Postman's announce url. And if you don't add the Postman Announce URL to your torrent, Postman will think it's dead, and might not show it to other users (especially if you just added it).
Also, if you want to download something, one of the more convenient ways to do it is by a magnet link: it contains a list of trackers and the hash of (a part of) the .torrent file. When you add a magnet link to your client, it contacts the tracker(s), gets some peers, and automatically downloads the .torrent file from them.
Also, you don't have to use the appimage specifically, you just need the version that uses libtorrent v2 or later, not v1.2. Preferably v2.0.10 or later, as this version has a fix for an issue which prevented announcing to Postman.
