Just letting you know this blog is now on I2P, and here is why I did it

I thought Tor would be full of dark magic bullshit, turns out it was mostly careful people.

I first touched Tor around early 2015. Not because I was brave or ideological or some freedom fighter type. I was just curious and bored and internet kept whispering about “hidden stuff”. You know the narrative. Dark web. Secrets. Crimes. Things you are not supposed to see. That kind of marketing works very well on young, online-brained people.

So I tried it.

And yeah, sure, there were shady corners. No surprise. But what really stuck with me was something way less dramatic. A lot of people there were just extremely careful. Like, almost obsessively so. High OPSEC everywhere. People thinking ten steps ahead before posting anything. Folks warning each other about metadata, browser leaks, habits that could screw you later. It felt less like a crime zone and more like a support group for people who actually understand how hostile the modern internet is.

That was moment bullshit narrative cracked.

Using Tor is not criminality. Tor exists because internet was pushed in a direction where being watched became normal. Where massive corporations and governments decided that your behavior, your habits, your interests, and your relationships were fair game to collect, analyze, and squeeze for profit or control. They are ones who made privacy feel suspicious. They are ones who turned basic anonymity into something “extreme”.

Tor is a reaction to that. A defensive tool. A response to an environment where tracking is default, consent is fake, and opting out is intentionally made painful. If companies and governments were not so aggressively invasive, tools like Tor would not even feel necessary. But here we are.

And you do not want that kind of constant observation hanging over your head. Even if you think you do not care, you really do not want that.

Over time, Tor stopped feeling edgy and started feeling basic. Like wearing a seatbelt. It is not exciting, but you are an idiot if you think you do not need it. Still, more I used Tor, more I noticed its limits. Not failures, just tradeoffs. Tor lets you access normal internet anonymously, but you are still interacting with a world that hates privacy by default.

That is when I started paying attention to I2P.

Not because it was cooler or more underground, but because it asked a different question. Instead of “how do I hide while using the existing internet”, it asked “what if we just did not play that game at all”.

Why I trust I2P more than Tor in certain situations, and why that matters

I am not going to explain what I2P is in a textbook way. You can read docs for that. This is about how it feels to use it and why, in some threat models, it is simply safer than Tor.

Biggest difference is philosophical. Tor assumes you want to go out there. To clearnet. To normal websites. To services that were never designed with privacy in mind. That means exits. Exit nodes are unavoidable in Tor. Your traffic has to leave network at some point. Exit is where a lot of shit can happen. Monitoring, blocking, manipulation, correlation. Even if content is encrypted, patterns still leak.

I2P does not center itself around exits. It treats leaving the network as dangerous by default. Most activity stays inside. Services live inside. Communication stays inside. There is no moment where your traffic suddenly steps into hostile territory like a lost tourist.

That alone removes a massive attack surface.

Another thing that matters a lot is how traffic moves. Tor uses bidirectional circuits. One path in, one path out. Efficient, yes. Clean, yes. Also easier to analyze if someone has enough visibility. Correlation attacks thrive on symmetry and timing.

I2P uses unidirectional tunnels. Incoming traffic uses one set of tunnels. Outgoing traffic uses a completely different set. From a surveillance perspective, this is a pain in the ass. Flows do not line up neatly. Timing becomes noisy. Linking sender and receiver becomes harder.

This is not magic. It does not make you invisible. But it shifts the difficulty upward, and that is the whole game in privacy. You are not trying to be impossible to track. You are trying to be expensive to track.

There is also the matter of visibility. Tor traffic stands out. Everyone knows what Tor looks like on the wire. ISPs know. Governments know. Websites know. That is why Tor gets blocked, throttled, and slapped with endless CAPTCHAs. Even if they cannot see what you are doing, they know you are doing something they do not like.

I2P flies under the radar more often. Not because it is better disguised, but because fewer people use it and fewer institutions bother targeting it at scale. That sounds like a weakness, and sometimes it is, but there is also security in being boring. Mass surveillance systems are optimized for scale. Niche networks slip through cracks.

OPSEC culture matters too, and this is something people rarely talk about. Tools do not exist in a vacuum. Users shape the risk. I2P users, on average, are extremely cautious. Sometimes annoyingly so. There is less casual behavior, less identity mixing, less “oops I logged into my real account” energy.

That does not make I2P users smarter. It just means the ecosystem selects for people who already think in threat models. That raises the baseline safety of the network as a whole.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. I2P is smaller. The community is not as crowded or as loud as Tor. Fewer services, fewer people, less noise. Smaller anonymity set. Slower onboarding. More friction. You actually have to think. For some people, that is a deal-breaker. They want a button they can click and forget. I2P is not that. I2P demands attention and patience. It punishes laziness.

And I am very aware that I am still new here. I am not claiming mastery. I am still learning how things work, still breaking stuff, still reading docs and lurking in forums. This is me experimenting, not preaching. Trying to understand whether this model fits the way I want to exist online.

Tor is amazing for what it does. I still use it. But Tor is about moving anonymously through a hostile world. I2P is about reducing how often you have to enter that world in the first place. One is camouflage. The other is architecture.

When people ask “which one is better”, I cringe a little. That question misses the point. Better for what. Better against whom. Better under which assumptions. Privacy is not a leaderboard. It is a set of compromises you choose consciously.

For me, I2P feels more honest. It does not pretend you can safely bolt privacy onto an internet that was designed for surveillance capitalism. It quietly says, “this environment is fucked, let’s build something else”. That is not flashy. It does not get headlines. It does not scare politicians as much. But it works, in its own stubborn way.

The scariest thing is not criminals using Tor or I2P. The scariest thing is how normal it has become to be watched constantly. Cameras, trackers, fingerprints, behavior profiles. All justified because “you have nothing to hide”. That argument only works if you believe privacy has no intrinsic value, which is a deeply broken way to see the world.

Privacy is not about hiding crimes. It is about maintaining boundaries. Psychological, social, political boundaries. Once those are gone, everything else follows. Control. Manipulation. Compliance.

So yeah, I2P is weird. It is clunky. It is not user-friendly. It does not care about growth metrics or adoption curves. But in a time where the internet feels increasingly like a behavioral farm, that stubborn refusal to optimize for convenience feels less like a flaw and more like a feature.

Tor taught me that privacy matters. I2P is teaching me that sometimes the safest move is not hiding better, but stepping out of the game entirely.

This blog is now also available via I2P here: http://maverickmiidqlmlr4dddce4jcn6xvrgpfsdz45hfp6nwuiaa3ja.b32.i2p/ or http://maverick.i2p/