I2P is a darknet similar to Tor but——most significantly——it’s peer-to-peer. Tor relies on centralized nodes to route traffic, but this can leave the onion network vulnerable to attack. Tor nodes have come under attack numerous times, malicious nodes have attempted to deanonymize users, and popular Reddit clone Dread has been getting DDOS’ed. I2P mitigates this problem because it’s a peer-to-peer network, but it’s written in Java, which is less than ideal for the level of security and performance required by an anonymity network like I2P.
i2pd is a more minimal i2p daemon written in C++. It works well. Here’s a quick, hopefully noob-friendly tutorial on how to set it up, including how I would personally recommend setting it up.
I don’t cover port forwarding or anything, but this tutorial is just enough to browse eepsites——these are I2P’s versions of onion sites, which can only be accessed through I2P.
i2pd. Assuming you’re using Arch Linux, install it with the following command:pacman -S i2pd
i2pd service. Here are the relevant commands for distros using systemd:# Start i2pd
systemctl start i2pd.service
# Check if i2pd is running
systemctl status i2pd.service
# Stop i2pd
systemctl stop i2pd.service
# Make i2pd start whenever system starts up
systemctl enable i2pd.service
yay -S librewolf-bin
(Optional) In LibreWolf, check the box under Settings -> LibreWolf -> Enable letterboxing. This improves privacy, and is a setting the Tor Browser enables by default.
(Optional) Under Settings -> Privacy & Security -> HTTPS-Only Mode, select “Don’t enable HTTPS-Only Mode.” Pretty much no eepsites use HTTPS, so we don’t need a warning about an insecure site every time we access an eepsite. This is not a security problem, since when using I2P traffic is already encrypted——Tor with onion sites is the same deal.
Go to Settings -> Network Settings -> Settings, then select “Manual proxy configuration.” Under HTTP and HTTPS, enter 127.0.0.1 as the address and 4444 as the port. This is required to connect to eepsites, but will also make it impossible to connect to clearnet sites.
Visit the site http://127.0.0.1:7070/. On this page you can see statistics about how i2pd is running. If some data is moving around, you probably set everything up right.
Wait a bit! Your system is now running i2pd, and it may need some time before it is able to connect to I2P sites. http://reg.i2p/ is a good site to start, try connecting to it until the page loads. Once you can connect to it you know I2P is working properly. This site is a registry of a bunch of I2P sites, so try some out and see if some load and some are interesting.
That should be it, hope this tutorial helped some people get into the world of I2P. The Internet seems to be going in a very bad direction away from anonymity and towards increased censorship, so spread the word about how I2P and other darknets work so you can be prepared for what’s to come. Check my about page for available darknet and clearnet links to this website.
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