sploodged

Here's the scary sounding part that can be counterintuitive. The routers you're communicating with do know your ip, since they have to like you mentioned. Your ip address is also in i2p's DHT as a "router info" which functions as a network addressbook for routers and services so things can be found without needing a centralized lookup service. Again, because for the network to work, routers need to be able to find eachother, or they can't communicate.

But, routers function on a need to know basis. i2p uses separate up and down links for each tunnel, and your side of the tunnel by default has 3 hops. other side usually also has 3 hops. typical unidirectional tunnel looks like this with total of 7 hops:

A-x-x-x=x-x-x-B

None of the chains in the link know what position they're in (except for the endpoints). They also don't know how long the whole tunnel is. The sender and receiver only know their parts of the tunnel. On the dht side, by design no single router has a whole view of the network, but there isn't a whole lot of information you get from that other than knowing that person at stated ip address uses i2p, which your isp would be able to tell for example anyway just like using tor or a vpn. There's no reason to try to obfuscate that except for getting around restrictive countries firewalls.

The way i made sense of it was like you have an envelope that is inside several other envelopes, with each envelope representing a layer of encryption. You get an envelope from kevin, so you know kevin. You open the envelope and see another envelope addressed to george, you give the envelope to him. So you know kevin and george. But the rest is unknown to you. You don't know who the true originator of the envelope is or where the message is ultimately going.

Not a perfect analogy, but because of this the ultimate sender and receiver are blind to each others ip address. It's layered encryption allowing this to happen which is similar to onion routing. Called garlic routing in i2p since there are some tweaks.

https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/garlic-routing

yeah some of the docs on the official site lean more technical than practical

similar yes but not the same. tor held together by volunteer that run nodes, i2p everyone is a node. tor good for clearnet things, i2p good for in-network things. torrenting in i2p is good for i2p, not tor. torrenting in i2p stays in the i2p network, doesn't go through exit nodes. there's only about 3 of those. it's torrenting as a darknet hidden service.

It's 2024 back that shit up on a dictaphone already

also just known as regular socks if you use i2p

it's generally advisable to not run a vpn in front of i2p. it will run better without one and you introduce another point of failure that can reduce your anonymity in some circumstances.

you can use a vpn for clearnet like normal along with i2p,ideally i2p not through the vpn though. it's a good way to cross-seed stuff into i2p though (you can do this as you're downloading from clearnet peers) and every now and again might find some random i2p seed holdout on a "rare" torrent.

we're trying, also some clients will let you do that. snark and XD are i2p only, qbittorrent and bigly bt will let you pull peers from clearnet and i2p if they've been cross-seeded

easiest to get going is probably https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall

when you get it running allow the router to run for a while. the longer you leave it running the better connected it'll become, it takes some time to get well connected into the network. torrenting right away is a good way to speedrun this since it'll discover a lot of peers this way. to browse eepsites (.i2p domains, kind of like .onion) router needs to be running, and need to change proxy settings in browser.

there are guides and plugins for this but basically you want to set http proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 4444. it will proxy everything through the router. clearnet sites should go through the default outproxy (stormycloud) but i2p isn't really build for clearnet browsing. if it's working should be able to visit an eepsite like http://notbob.i2p (has a registry of other eepsites). things like trackers, forums, git repositories can be found on notbob.

can setup irc through it (comes preconfigured) and has built in torrent client (i2psnark). can also setup email, java router has that built in, as well as a webserver to host your own site through i2p.

if you just want to torrent biglybt comes with a router on its own, settings under "i2p helper" plugin if you just want to torrent through it without all the other stuff.

good to hear, couple new uploaders have been popping up so maybe things will get more rounded