Uh, no, unless by 'a few friends' you mean something like 500,000 people.

I2P is significantly slower than not I2P at visiting not I2P websites, something roughly between 10 to 100x times slower.

What was being asked was how much more agile the I2P network itself would become, if many more people used it.

With I2P, more users = more nodes to route packets through = smoother operation for the whole network.

This is the inverse of typical mass network paradigm, where more users = you have to throw more and more servers at handling requests, or, you get... well, basically what is still going on with Amazon US East 01 right now, functionally internet brownouts.

Precisely how much faster I2P would get with say, a million more daily users, thats very complex to even try and estimate.

But visting a normal internet website via I2P is always going to be much slower than via using a VPN or just straight connecting, because when I2P does that, its basically just acting as a giant maze of chained proxies + a way of encrypting packets that nothing else does.

On the flip side of that, you can't access a .i2p site unless your are using I2P, like how you can't access a .onion site unless you are using Tor.

Analagous to how... you can't download a torrent by just downloading the .torrent itself... you need a whole program that can use that file to connect to peers, and that program is what downloads the data.