Honestly that is fine. Just consider this to be one of the times you hear about I2P. I also don't typically start paying much attention to something unless I've heard it like 3 or more times.
That's exactly correct!
So no, i2p won't interact with the clearnet at all. So it doesn't help with access to clearnet sites that are geoblocked. I never used VPNs for geoblocking specifically, just for torrenting, so this wasn't in my list of use cases.
It makes sense sticking with a VPN if you really need to access a site that is blocked in your country. Or you could use Tor for that, but Tor has its own issues.
Also I'm still not familiar enough with I2P to know if it's vulnerable to hostile takeover. It IS a completely different protocol from Tor though, so my guess would be it doesn't have that same issue.
I did explain in another comment some general information about I2P. The one where I mention how it is a darknet but is much different than Tor.
The reason many more people don't use it yet is because it is hard to setup. That's pretty much it. Similar to lemmy or other things that exist it is just difficult to get people using it unless it is significantly easier to use.
However, recently things have gotten easier. The dev for i2p has included an easy windows installer for i2p that should make this much better for most users. So some development has happened there.
Also just recently qBittorrent included support for I2P in their latest release. Before that, only 2 Bittorrent clients existed. Now we're up to 3.
The biggest advantage is that you don't need to spend money anymore for a VPN. Or any money for a seedbox either if you have a home computer you can just leave up to seed for you.
The biggest disadvantage is the hard setup and (so far) lack of torrent availability. More stuff is getting added all the time but we need more scene groups adding their releases to i2p (cross-seeding).
Port forwarding, which Mullvad was allowing until recently, allows other people to connect to your bittorrent client that is downloading/seeding torrents. This makes it easier for you to find others who can either help you download, or seed for other users in the network.
Basically it improves download speeds and allows you to easily upload to everyone else.
You don't need to route all traffic, just the traffic from your bittorrent client.
Download speeds have improved significantly as there are more people on there seeding than ever.
i2p is significantly better than a proxy, you jump through multiple hosts/tunnels before reaching the service.
Also it isn't all network traffic at all, just services connecting through i2p like a web browser you have setup to use it.
No. I2P works differently than Tor. There are no exit nodes, because there are no exits. I2P is separate from all clearnet traffic. For example, you cannot browse reddit.com from within i2p, like you can with tor.
Mullvad disabled port forwarding due to bad people abusing it. It would happen to anyone honestly.
Ebikes are definitely the answer. Much easier to ride up hills and very accessible for regular people to start riding. Plus they are significantly cheaper than cars when you account for insurance and registration and maintenance, etc.
I'm not personally going back to reddit. I've had problems with them for a while now so I'm glad they finally forced me off their platform.
I understand what you mean though. Lemmy definitely has a way to go to be more user friendly but I think we'll get there at this rate.
I genuinely can't believe people preorder games but especially Bethesda games, which are notoriously buggy at launch and have tons of issues.
Yeh I had tried torrenting on Tor a LONG time ago but people made it clear to not do that on Tor for one reason or another. But on i2p, the devs made a torrent client directly into the software. It was one of their features and something they want people to use.