I am not in a place where I can afford a VPN (do not start suggesting cheap VPNs to me istg), and in addition, you have to place a lot of trust in the VPN. Tribler seems promising, except... For the giant disclaimer that's been on the site for years. That worries me. I am quite worried about getting scary letters from my ISP or something when torrenting.
Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature.
Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.
Edit: Seems like there are a lot of issues below the surface as well... https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19118584/10120234
And Lokinet, I2P, and GNUnet have their own massive problems... https://comment.ctrl.blog/discussion/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent
ngl, kinda depressing that it's like this...
Edit 2: I misread the article a bit, it's not quite as dire as I thought it was initially, but the warning and the fact that only the core file-transferring features are anonymized at all... Is a bit disconcerting.
Torrenting on the TOR network is actively discouraged. It uses a lot of bandwidth, and it hurts other people's speeds.
If you want to torrent on an anonymous network, use I2P. It may be harder to set up than TOR, but you can torrent entirely inside it. It has trackers inside, and a lot of clearnet torrents have also been listed on them. And most importantly, I2P is more prepared for torrenting than TOR is. When you connect to it, you add capacity to the network, so using bandwidth for torrenting is not as detrimental to it.
Tribler is not Tor, and I know Tor doesn't work. That's why I asked if there's anything like Tor rather than just doing the stupid thing of using Tor immediately. I'll look into I2P.
Seconding i2p. Might as well get used to it as vpns are slowly banned everywhere.