I am not sure about further 'reading', but the youtuber Mental Outlaw has a number of videos that do a pretty decent job of introducing and explaining I2P as a concept, as well as some videos that walk you through at least one way to do the actual setup process.

Though, some of those may be slightly out of date by now, those vids are I think a few years old at this point.

There's also the difference between I2P proper, which I believe is still done wholly in Java, and I2PD, which is basically the same I2P, but rewritten in ... either C or C++.

And, depending on how you're going to want to use I2P on your system... as in uh, just a shunt or mode for a specific program, vs trying to reroute your whole OS's traffic through it... that gets messy and complicated fast, depending on your setup, and exactly what you want to do.

Also, depending on your ISP / router situation, you may or may not have to futz with opening a port for I2P on your router firewall.

I'm wondering the same thing! If you get an answer, would you mind letting me know, if it's not too much trouble? I've read a lot about it, but it still feels like I'm missing/not understanding most of it. That may just me a 'me & my crappy brain' issue, though.

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.

So, roughly, the webdev equivalent of a gamedev properly ordering and and optimizing how a scene is rendered.

You know, the kind of thing you would think is an industry standard, but it turns out the industry doesn't optimize for optimization, it optimizes for current quarter profits.