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Comment by dmantis | Hacker News Reader

I tried I2P not so long ago and was quite impressed by the design decisions and the quality of the technology. It's truly an amazing piece of software that covers basically everything you need for a distributed network.

The only thing missing is actually the community and usage, because the technology has a network effect, and more users with stable routers provide faster and a more reliable network. So it's indeed slow at the moment. I highly recommend giving it a chance and playing a bit with it. Even for non-anonymity and security cases, it's fun to play with hole punching, global addressing by public keys, and stuff like that, which you can see in things like Iroh and libp2p.

It provides a simple universal SAM interface and libraries to work with it to plug other apps.

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https://geti2p.net/en/

And if you don't want to install Java, there's also a C++ implementation: https://i2pd.website/

I have been hearing good things about I2P for 2 decades but what are the risks when using that thing?

Is this like running a Tor node where you could potentially get a knock on the door because somebody else went on some pedo website?

I2P doesn't have exit nodes like Tor, so it's essentially the same thing as running a Tor relay from an outside perspective, with a few positive differences.

I2P is mainly an overlay network that routes traffic only inside the network. The upside is that providers won't ban your IP for participation if you run a node. I know that with Tor, many datacenters/CDNs don't care whether it's a relay or exit node and will blanket ban all known IPs of the network. You also won't attack someone on the clearnet or somehow participate as a scapegoat in clearnet crimes.

I've never heard about any consequences for running non-exit relays in Tor, though if you're in a country that strictly punishes usage of any anonymous technology, that might be risky anyway.

I2P has several commercial "outproxies" that proxy traffic to the usual internet, but that's not the intended usage and it's not enabled on typical users' routers.

UPD: Anyway, if you feel uncomfortable sharing others' traffic and want to only use it as a client, you can disable transit traffic completely in both Java and C++ implementations.

You got me into i2p. My rpi router and dozens of servers are now i2p floodfill nodes!

Thanks!

what is thing you are talking about? can you share some links?

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