I2P is a P2P darknet. on tor the network is run by volenteers (~6000 nodes) while on I2P everyone on the nerwork is a node, and their are no built in exit nodes (in i2p their called outproxies). the official I2P router has a built in torrent client as well. like torrents the more people on i2p the faster the network, while the opposite is true for tor.

It is a different anonymity network, which works differently in many aspects.

I2P and Tor comparison: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor
I2P on Bittorrent (mostly a client dev guide, but has some interesting info): https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent

Currently BiglyBt supports I2P and it has been that way for quite some time.
If you use qBittorrent, I2P support will come in version 4.6. you can try it out now with the published release candidate version. Probably other clients are working on it too as the support is coming from the libtorrent programming library, which is used by other clients too.

Right now, I2P is quite slow in my experience, in terms of loading I2P websites. I hope that it's just a misconfiguration on my part, or that these specific sites I tried are just overloaded.

There's an i2p community here on lemmy. Click my username for a link.

I2P is still around? I remember experimenting with it a decade ago. Sounds like it's still a slow experience.

Gotcha, yeah that checks out. I guess I never made that connection, even though I use TOR and torrent here and there. Probably also because I'm more concerned about download speeds over privacy when torrenting. And regular web traffic over TOR is often insanely slow compared to the clearnet.

Ever since getting a copyright strike several years ago, I've switched to using a commercial VPN while torrenting. I don't know if that's the all-in-one solution for hiding from my ISP, but it seems to work. But I also rarely torrent these days, too, so not as many opportunities for them to catch me, I suppose.

I2P is a truly anonymous darknet where every user is a node in the network, unlike TOR where everyone is leeching off of the 6000 nodes. I2P also works great for torrenting. I2P is only for accessing I2P sites and not for anonymous clearnet browsing.

I have never tried the mobile version, but here's some info for desktop:

There is a java version simply called "I2P" and there is a C++ one called "I2Pd". Start with the java one, it's easier and has built-in torrent webclient.

Install I2P from geti2p.net and start it. You are now a node/router in the network. To access I2P darknet websites like http://planet.i2p you have to tell your browser to use I2P proxy. You should use a different browser profile for using I2P, on firefox you can create one at about:profiles .

Enable I2P on firefox: Settings -> General -> Network Settings. Set manual http and https proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 4444 . You should now be able to visit eepsites (sites ending with .i2p). Always put http:// manually at the beginning. If it tells you to use jump services because it can't find the site, just click on one of the suggestions.

Torrents are on http://tracker2.postman.i2p . Find one, copy the magnet link and go to the torrent webclient: 127.0.0.1:7657/i2psnark . Add the torrent there. Done, you are now anonymously torrenting.

and sometimes we do care about successful delivery but need to handle that ourselves so we use UDP to avoid layering delivery verification mechanisms.

https://openvpn.net/faq/what-is-tcp-meltdown

thank you sir!