after a year or so hiatus I reinstalled i2p on my debian.
I don’t think I’m going to use it much: I enjoyed using it to torrent files and to ask about censorship circumvention, things I now have alternatives to.
why is this network still relevant?
I2P isn’t popular, but it will always be relevant.
Unlike Tor, I think the heavy use of p2p file sharing on the network adds “cover traffic,” making things like correlation attacks harder.
I’m curious what the alternatives to i2p are that you use now?
I wish there were more higher latency anonymous networks (to make correlation attacks harder). katzenpost.network looks interesting, but is just academic right now; all the other stuff in this space is blockchain crap.
It’s technology like this that I think will become more and more important as governments seek to restrict access to large parts of the internet. UK and Australia are forging ahead in censorship, and the EU is well on their way. The US already does some censorship, as do large parts of Asia and Russia.
No matter the reason given, it’s always about control. So less easily censored technologies will be very useful for anyone that wants the ability to research truth, or at least, alternate points of view.
btw any of you i2p nerds have a mixed setup with clearnet torrenting + i2p?
how did you set it up and how do you like it?
I use I2P every day for downloading torrents. In some ways, it’s even better than Tor. I use them together. Tor for accessing onion services and as a VPN and I2P to download torrents. Granted, I use I2PD.
In contrast to To, Torrenting on I2P actually helps the network and doesn’t hurt it.
I always saw I2P as a more modern and distributed onion-routing alternative to Tor.
The thing is that people are used to making use of Tor in different ways than the way they use I2P, but you can also have outproxies (ie. exit nodes/relays) in I2P the same way as in Tor… and you can also host a service inside the Tor network without relying on an exit node, like in I2P. It’s just that people only seem to want to host exit nodes for Tor and not so much for I2P, this led to internal communications in I2P being more common (which is a good thing), whereas in Tor it’s common to use it for anonymous access to the clearnet (which strains the network and causes chokepoints, specially with big downloads or torrent sharing). That’s just a matter of usage, not capability.
It’s really not, until it is. I personally see it as a fallback infrastructure for redundency if Tor, VPNs, Bittorrent, etc. go dark. But other than that, no, it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose rn.
And that’s exactly what happened a few years ago when the tor network was having issues.
People needed a backup, and i2p was there waiting.
