I2p meanwhile is just really good for anonymity. I think using it for messengers is the best use. I was able to find a bunch of stuff, and yes unlike the dark web this would mostly be also there on the clearnet, mainly because there is no such business on i2p I guess
Just random people offering services for free, a few pads, pastebins, fileservers
You can find quite some cool stuff actually, but I think the main advantage is using it for messaging
And unlike i2p, i2pd also doesnt really use much battery? I could totally keep that on all day
Dumb question: can anyone host a i2p site on a personal device? For instance, if I leave a PC or old phone connected to the network, how easy/hard is it to configure so I have a working site accessible to everyone on the network?
Anyone can host a site. Just keep it up for like a month without a pause so that it can be discovered.
Then go to a domain registrar and get a domain name. I2p sites have BASE32 names, kinda like onion addresses. But they can also use shorter names like postman.i2p
If you register such a name, the site will become more discoverable as those registrars likely share the sites, you might appear in some lists, people connect to you, add you to their address book and forward stuff to you.
I2P and Tor both aim to provide anonymous internet browsing but differ in their architectures and methods. Tor (short for The Onion Router) uses a system of layered encryption to route internet traffic through a network of volunteer-operated servers. This creates a series of encrypted layers (hence the onion analogy) that mask the user's IP address and data content from any would-be observers.
In contrast, I2P uses a garlic routing technique, where multiple messages are bundled together into a single encrypted packet. This method enhances privacy by making it more difficult for anyone to analyze the traffic and link the data back to specific users.
Also, Tor supports access to the open internet (clearnet), while I2P only allows access to websites and services (known as eepsites) within its own networks. Outproxies, which are similar to Tor exit nodes, can be used to access the clearnet with I2P. However, this reduces privacy as your data leaves the network and is a less common use case.