Friends,
Although tor is the most successful darknet to date, it is not the most sustainable. If 2.5 million users roughly, there are only around 10,000 nodes to go around. I2P is much smaller than Tor, only around 75,000 nodes roughly, but almost all of those nodes route traffic. I2P is fully P2P with the exception of reseed servers. It also has an API called Simple Anonymous Messaging apps installed seperately to communicate over the I2P network. I2P is also superior to Tor in the sense that it uses Garlic routing, which means that multiple TCP or UDP (yes, I2P supports UDP) are wrapped into one encrypted message to better resist traffic analysis. There are three working implementations of I2P, Vanilla I2P, (https://geti2p.org  ) I2P+ (https://i2pplus.github.io  ) and Purple I2P. (https://i2pd.website  ) All of them support Simple Anonymous Messaging. Unlike Tor, File sharing is good for the I2P network, and becuase if its P2P nature, there is more than enough Traffic to go around. File sharing helps the I2P network resist traffic analysis by providing large amounts of cover traffic. So lets take DarkMX into a new era by supporting I2P. Purple I2P is licensed under the BSD license, so DarkMX can ship a stripped down version specfically for DarkMX. We must not put all our eggs into one basket, support I2P.

All the best,
Anoncat

Still thinking about this... thanks for the info.

I know the Tor situation is not great... I will figure this out soon.

i2pd (purple) is what I use, but beware that it may not have the latest and greatest (some reasonable discussions about the matter on zzz.i2p). It's light, and it gets the job done. If you can get there, the next leap is to bond connections across multiple tunnels to improve throughput (you will be disappointed otherwise, imho).

--h0p3

I have looked into i2pd. If KH adds I2P support to DarkMX, I recommend he add UDP support to take advantage of SSU2. In also recommend he set the defaults for built in I2P to 6 tunnels that are 3 hops in length, as well as 3 backup tunnels for redundancy. You could not do that on I2PD I2P because of performance concerns, but in my experience Java I2P does it just fine. I recommend changing the ports so that it does not conflict with any other I2P router installed on the system, but DarkMX should notify you if it detects another I2P router on your system and give you the option to use that instead. Another Darknet KH can look into is py-ipv8. It is a p2p onion router based on Tor with a trust blockchain for bandwidth distribution. It is written in python, so it should be easy to understand. They also have documentation av available. They just hit their five year anniversary with their 2.9.1852 release. https://github.com/Tribler/py-ipv8  https://py-ipv8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/  Source code: https://github.com/Tribler/py-ipv8/archive/refs/tags/2.9.zip  The python implementation is released under the LGPL-3.0. They have a work in progress Kotlin implementation as well.
Edit: I wrote Java I2P when I meant I2PD

+ for I2Pd support. Hops length could be set variable (performance vs anonymity) depending on trust level of a peer.

@KH I think that it would be worthwhile to bundle the Tor Expert Bundle from the Tor project in the installation directory of DarkMX. Right now the latest version is 0.4.8.11. The Tor Expert Bundle supports Windows 64 Bit, Windows 32 Bit, Linux 64 Bit, Linux 32 Bit, Android ARM64, Android ARM32, Android x86-32 and Android X86-64. The Tor bundle should use a custom Torrc purpose built for DarkMX and should be separate from any other Tor on the system. It would also be worthwhile to split Tor traffic between no less than 2 and no more than 7 tunnels to reduce the load on the tor network and to improve anonymity and download speed.

I think it will reduce anonymity thus can't be forced by default