I2P [0] does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks.
I think it's being able to launch infrastructure like AWS but for consumers. Imagine one click to launch your "virtual home" / bastion. You can mange your virtual home from trusted devices (desktop, mobile, possibly web if you grant keys to 3rd party). In your virtual home you can setup I2P, a personal VPN (e.g. algo by trailofbits), tunnel/forward home server traffic to public internet (e.g. RPi), install torrent client & fire sharing drive for family, etc.
Thoughts?
It's generally slow and it needs port forwarding to work correctly. Its design (whether you look at the java router, I2P, or the C++ one, i2pd) isn't really noob-friendly, either. That's more than enough to deter almost everyone from using it, it seems.
>Is there a need?
I'd say there's an ever-increasing need for anonymous, uncensorable platforms on the Internet. I wager we will progressively notice an urgency to turn to this kind of applications in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong on this one, but I don't think my guess will be too far off.
What are you talking about? You need to put a proxy 127.0.0.1:4444 into your browser setup, but I wouldn't call it "port forwarding". Apart from that, you just install it and go to the eepsites. Upd: Indeed, you will also have to wait until the router finds enough peers.
>What are the missing pieces to get people using this?
I would say, it only needs more people to know about it.
> and you'll be leeching off the network instead of contributing to it
Does not look like a problem in Tor (despite one would expect otherwise, given that by default you do not contribute back unlike in i2p). You just need enough seeders.
From what I've read, it doesn't seem to be comparable to GNUnet in any way, though. As far as I can tell, it is just another p2p network (or, rather, framework) running on top of the existing TCP/IP stack. However, GNUnet aims to replace the internet stack.
How does it compare to Tor?