this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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[–] Bloefz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I'm kinda hoping a more mainstream darknet will appear. Basically like the role VPN providers have now but more .onion like. It's basically what common people use for stuff that's slightly at odds with the law but not too terrible. Like pirate bay. Soon adult sites and social media will fall in this category too if you desire anonymity.

Tor and I2P are too dark for the regular person to go to for their social media just because they want anonymity. There's too much really nasty stuff there. The kind of crime that actually harms real people, not some rich shareholders.

The problem of how to create anonymity even when the law forbids it, while still pushing back against the real crimes is a difficult one.

Basically I want my 2002 internet back but how?

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tor and I2P are too dark for the regular person to go to for their social media just because they want anonymity. There's too much really nasty stuff there. The kind of crime that actually harms real people, not some rich shareholders.

Uhm, no? You still have to actively search for and visit those sites, you don't just open tor browser and randomly land on dread

[–] Bloefz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No but it's the association that makes you suspicious, gets exit nodes banned and just gives it a bad reputation. That damages more mainstream initiatives because nobody wants to be known as promotor of the silk road and csam network.

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The services you're mentioning became as large and 'dark' as they are due to actually being secure services, any secure enough service will become like that eventually. Any service not like that is usually not secure enough unfortunately.

[–] Bloefz@lemmy.world 0 points 13 hours ago

Yeah that's why I think there should be a balance.

Like the commercial VPN scene. Torrent a few movies and you're totally safe. But harm kids or sell weapons and you will eventually get your door knocked down.

That's why VPNs have an ok reputation and they are publicly advertising. And tor has this dark shadow over it.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Tor is the only one that has that type of association because it's the biggest, so it always gets mentioned in the media.

Most people don't even know that there are other darknets like i2p.

On top of that, current Tor actually has pretty good latency and connection speeds when not on a bridge. Last time I tried it out, I was getting 80Mbps up/down. Several users here even regularly or exclusively access lemmy with Tor.

I think i2p should actually make an effort to promote higher base bandwidth sharing out of box because it scales easily since its completely decentralized and everyone is a node, unlike Tor. It could easily become more user friendly if nodes weren't starting off at like 128kbps speeds.

Plus like the other reply mentioned, you have to go out of your way to find the criminal stuff on darknets. Most users would probably be accessing clearnet stuff anyway, and .onion addresses on clearnet sites that have dedicated onion addresses like duckduckgo or some social media platforms.