Why not to use I2P

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lgillis
Posts: 144
Joined: 20 Oct 2018 12:52

Why not to use I2P

Post by lgillis »

is something that some of you may have wondered after looking at the links in this forum.

Dear fellow campaigners, by sending people to the Internet you are sending a clear message: writing about I2P on a regular Internet site is ok, but using I2P is not.

Who, if not the creators themselves, uses I2P, who are the characters that now use the net? Why do people from the official forums prefer to spend their time on the Internet rather than building something here, which they claim to be fighting for? These are questions that you may provoke unintentionally. You are clearly distancing yourselves from I2P with these "sending people to the internet" to get information about I2P or to discuss it.

Just as food for thought.
Spring https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF-q-IGQQb1uK7fYuaQiRpcORDSmfsY2n
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eyedeekay
Posts: 75
Joined: 21 Jul 2018 06:53

Re: Why not to use I2P

Post by eyedeekay »

Well this is embarassing. Somewhere between the browser and this forum I haven't actually been logging in, and none of my posts for the past several months have been showing up. That's a lot of effort down the drain that I didn't notice until now. I guess I do really need to spend more time here now since I didn't see it.

We can't talk about I2P without going to the places that people actually exist in and communicating with people who are not always like us. Did you know we have a study that says only 3/10 people can successfully configure an IRC client even with detailed instructions? Never mind the people who *insist* on a particular IRC client and don't know how to adapt existing instruction to their client and ask one of us to do it. And this https://thetinhat.com/tutorials/darknet ... guide.html "tutorial" bane of my friggin existence half the people who try to configure their browser follow instructions that were crappy when they were written. There is every reason to believe that most of the people who install I2P never actually get it to do anything successfully, and the problem is even worse on mobile. If we want to bootstrap new users in and onboard them successfully we need a place to reach them that they already understand and that they don't need to do anything special to access. The canopener needs to be on the outside of the can. That said, I'll make more of an effort to be here and answer questions on this forum too, and login by clearnet for now so that the posts actually show up.

I'll have to get some help from the admin to see how to get the forum to not swallow my posts.
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lgillis
Posts: 144
Joined: 20 Oct 2018 12:52

Re: Why not to use I2P

Post by lgillis »

I suspect there are also studies that have found the same thing about cooking. That would at least explain the large market for convenience foods. ;-)

In my opinion, the can openers could also be ordinary blogs and forums that at least represent an alternative to the established top dogs. Telegram and Co. have reached an audience of millions within a very short time. This was not achieved by rubbing the users' noses in their ingenuity, but by providing their customers with easy access. And just between us, there is a difference if I have to give an impromptu speech in front of an audience of strangers in IRC or if I can bring my already relatively sorted thoughts into a discussion. And it also leads nowhere if every user has to download half the (I2P) Internet with an app that has to be installed, like with Syndie and the so-called Fediverse. Users need platforms that don't burden them, but are intuitive and fun to use. If you implement this, participants will also be willing to reimburse some of your expenses via donations.

Dear users, you are also responsible for the success of this experiment. It is tactically clumsy to continue to use the ordinary Internet for everything that is democratically legitimate and to switch to the security network only for the extraordinary things. Come to this forum with your questions and suggestions about I2P, that's what it was created for.

And as always, it's just my opinion.
Spring https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF-q-IGQQb1uK7fYuaQiRpcORDSmfsY2n
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eyedeekay
Posts: 75
Joined: 21 Jul 2018 06:53

Re: Why not to use I2P

Post by eyedeekay »

You have a point, especially when you compare the onboarding problem and convenience foods. In fact, our opinions line up on almost everything except perhaps for the utility of this particular forum at this particular time. Once we have Microwave-ready, Instant-Pot I2P then this forum makes a lot more sense, IMO.

A "Microwave-ready" I2P is an important goal and we've made a lot of progress toward that this year with the packaging efforts: https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall and I'm not stopping there:
In fact, onboarding is probably 65%+ what I spend my time caring about, if you look around gitlab/github a bit you'll see that I'm actually working on most of the things that you mentioned, because I think they're good ideas too. But following along with what I'm doing is not your job so I'll give you the rundown of what the I2P ecosystem can expect from me outside of i2p.i2p and i2p.firefox in the next say about 2 months or so. Probably a little after the next release mostly.
  • First, ShellServices. I am making it so that the I2P router can wrap a native application and use it as a plugin like a real ClientApp. This opens up I2P Plugin development to non-Java applications without the issues involved in the old ShellCommandhttps://i2pgit.org/i2p-hackers/i2p.i2p/ ... equests/39 Native app developers who want to explore interoperability with I2P should contact me personally.n ShellServices should be ready in 1.6.0.
  • Next BRB. BRB is a multipurpose IRC client and server combined which is configured to only make connections using I2P with the SAM API. It serves two purposes, to act as an easy way to connect to IRC2P and to provide a self-hosted group chat that doesn't depend on IRC2P at all. https://github.com/eyedeekay/brb Release depends on ShellService.
  • Then, Railroad. Railroad is a personal blog which is designed for a single user to run on the same machine as their I2P router. It presents a simple, obvious GUI for editing the blog, adding pages and entries, configures itself via SAM. https://github.com/eyedeekay/railroad Release pretty much depends on ShellService for now.
Then, a little further down the line unless someone else wants to do it instead:
  • Also, feedsharing. Once we have a bunch of blogs publishing RSS feeds and have a way to take *all* the configuration out of chat then I think the next thing to do is probably pluginize a feedreader, with the ability to republish the feeds it gets in the aggregate as another eepsite. Which I've been experimenting with over here. https://github.com/eyedeekay/feedloggr Release depends on nothing but it's way more interesting to do after Railroad is out.
  • Also also, syndie-go plugin. Syndie has been rewritten in Go by a contributor who's done a very nice job so far, I believe this person is on this forum as well as IRC2P and is the most recent post in the Syndie forum. At any rate, we talk from time to time and my hope is, in the next few months, that we can get his implementation ready to use and ultimately re-pluginize syndie as well as providing a standalone application. I know there are some criticisms of syndie in your post but my hope personally is that we can use Syndie as a semiglobal comment space, sort of like a distributed Disqus for I2P Blogs.
What I believe will begin to take shape out of this is more of a social network based on the architecture of the so-called "blogosphere" which is loosely-coupled with feeds and comments, and where most sites are self-controlled, personal sites where the operator was required to configure very little or perhaps nothing, other than to install a plugin. I know it doesn't mean much until the software reaches you but we hear you.
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lgillis
Posts: 144
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Re: Why not to use I2P

Post by lgillis »

That's an impressive list of gadgets you present here. I assume all these tools interlock for the purpose of the envisioned blogosphere? For example, the feed reader is to pick up Railroad's feeds, and the IRC client is for users to talk about blog posts, because the blog doesn't have a community feature like comments for reasons. Am I on the right track with this?
Spring https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF-q-IGQQb1uK7fYuaQiRpcORDSmfsY2n
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eyedeekay
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Joined: 21 Jul 2018 06:53

Re: Why not to use I2P

Post by eyedeekay »

Yeah that is the idea. In combination they should work with and enhance eachother. They're supposed to be standalone too, you shouldn't need to run a chat or a feedreader if you don't want to. BRB should be generally useful as an IRC client even without the IRC server component running. Running a blog does require the blog to be running to be accessible, of course. The idea is also to really lower the barrier to entry for creating useful services on the network in a sort of "independent" way taking advantage of I2P for hosting without a third party's assistance.
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