Other darknets

Tor is of course not the only darknet, and it was not the original darknet. It is the biggest though, probably followed by I2P.

You either know what you're doing, or you don't. Although, if you don't intend to do something serious, it's probably fine. Whatever? :P

I2P

I2P is about as old as Tor, but much less known. I2Ps main difference from Tor is that Everyone participates with relaying traffic (participate as relays in their peers tunnels) in I2P, while Tor only a subset of the computers are relaying traffic, and acting as exit-nodes. I2P is using garlic routing instead of onion routing (they're almost the same thing), and supports both UDP-like and TCP-like dataflows. Tor only allows TCP connections in comparison. Goto getI2P to get the original java I2P, i2pd for a C++ rewrite, and I2P+ is another java rewrite of I2P. The java versions are user-friendly, while i2pd is more for servers and fat kilopound hackers living in smelly basements. The I2P darknet is a closed garden network, it's like a secret island, meaning you connect to it but not out from it. It has really bad clearnet reachability in comparison with Tor, like it has only one or two exit nodes and they are disabled by default. I don't think anyone is using the exit tunnels.

The .i2p addresses comes in two flavours, *.b32.i2p cipher-hashes (the equivalents of .onion) and human-readable *.i2p. Almost everyone uses human-readable addresses when linking to stuff. Your i2p software read human-readable addresses from your configured indexing sites. The main indexing sites applies minimal amounts of censorship, while others allows the pitch black darkness that cuts deep in your soul, that shit that causes permanent scars and mental trauma. Finding the indexes to obtain addresses from will be the 1st step after installing I2P. I feel some kind of responsibility to not help out here.

There are some client software written for I2P, like forums, bittorrent, IRC, et.c. Most software leaks personal info so that a programmer had to specifically adapt a program for I2P, or write it from scratch, means some effort has been made to anonymize it. With a fully integrated high-speed I2P relay, bittorrent downloads at 200-500KB/s is achievable using the default settings. There are lots of really good torrents listed by the I2P trackers. Bittorrent also gives cover traffic, it's noise that makes surveillance of who-talks-to-who more difficult.
You can obtain much higher bittorrent speeds by increasing number of tunnels, shortening the tunnel length, as well as bumping number of peers, et.c., for the tunnel used by the I2P bittorrent program. Doing so decreases your anonymity of course, especially shortening the tunnel length, but is still more secure than bittorrenting on clearnet as long as you dont do zero-hop tunnels.. Normal internets is "zero-hop", a VPN is a 1-hop tunnel, I2P by default uses 3-hop tunnels to a random set of rendezvous nodes in the i2p swarm, and then another 3-hop tunnels to the destination. (For comparison: Tor always use 3-hop tunnels for reaching internets, 6-hop tunnels for .onions, and uses fat circuits not garlic).
Bittorrent does not need to be protected against NSA, but for it to provide some cover traffic the settings should also not be too damn de-anonymized. However, if you are ONLY concered about have a minimal amount of plausible deniability so you cant be sentenced for piracy in a normal court, then even a zero-hop tunnel likely provides that.
Put plainly, in I2P, warzing, seeding, copying movies et.c., increases your anonymity. (if you do not de-anonymize it too hard, ie. maybe use at least 1- or 2-hop tunnels?)
Depending on how paranoid you are, you can change those settings in I2P, and these settings can be made per application (e.g. web browsing, bittorrent, IRC, ...). A special type of tunnels are the exploratory tunnels, which are used for making lookups in the I2P DHT swarm, and changing their settings are generally pointless, and could be harmful from a security point of view.
For a tunnel, it is the length from your node to the rendevouz point, that you control. The complete tunnel consists of both your tunnel to the rendezvous, and another tunnel controlled by the anonymous peer, that goes from the rendezvous to the peer -- making both anonymous to each other while still guaranteeing security.

Because everyone that uses I2P also participates as relays in I2P, if one hosts a service (an FTP or HTTP service, et.c.) then it is possible to deduce who is hosting the service, by examining uptime of all nodes in I2P and comparing them to the uptime of the service. It is however possible to mitigate the timing deanonymizing attack in I2P by multihoming, ie. run a set of relays that all host the service and all use the same .i2p address - then as long as one of the I2P servers remains online, the service does also. (As a comparison with Tor: The onion service hosts acts as Tor clients, with a tunnel to the .onion rendevouz. By just watching what clients are always connected to the Tor network, the authorities should be able to create a list of clients that are likely running darknet sites. Normal Tor clients create short-living tunnels, while clients that run darknet sites are always connected. The more traffic a site has, the more traffic that client will have. Inversely, if a site has almost no traffic, then just bumping traffic to that site will cause a similiar bump of traffic to that client hosting that site. Most adversaries do not have have that amount of network surveillance capacity, but some adversaries do have that - 5Eyes has it, China have that inside China, GCHQ within UKs borders, et.c.)

I2P is more of a community than Tor is. It's the Shangri-La behind impassable mountains, with *maybe* 10K paranoid and not-at-all-social inhabitants. Maybe there are more than 10K inhabitants. The vast majority of them do not host content and are just silent and boring (i.e. Do you even host a single normal web site from your computer? How many darknet sites?)

Hyphanet AKA FreeNet

Hyphanet is the new name for Freenet, it seems. It is all about decentralized censor-resistant serverless webpages. The server-less feature completely disassociates the identity of the owner of a web service from the web service. Server-less here does not mean "cloud", freenet is older than the fucking cloud. It means the clients that participate in the Freenet network collectively host the web pages inside it, and through lots of complicated cryptography and protocol magic does not always themselves know what webpages they host (sometimes they know). Originally it was "Web 1.0" but nowadays it supports websites with scripting, which also allows for forums and whatnot. The extremely cited Freenet paper was important during the birth of the darknets. (BTW: The "decentralized server-less webpages with scripting" is basically the same technology as the Etherum cryptocurrency is using for its smart contracts and autonomous corporations, et.c.) Clearnet.

Yggdrasil

Yggdrasil is an overlay network that routes packets through many different types of networks. In norse mythology the Yggrasil tree is the world-tree with roots going to all domains, to the dwarves, humans, trolls, alfs, et.c.. Yggrasil routes its traffic over mostly the internets, but can also tunnel through Tor, I2P (i2pd) and LokiNet, so it's nigh impossible to trace those users that read the manual and knows what they are doing (i.e. peer only via I2P or Tor). By default it is not intended to hide your identity. It too is a closed garden darknet, with few or no possibilities to reach clearnet via Yggdrasil. It creates an IPv6 tun device and randomly assigns unspoofabla IPv6 addresses (from a hash of your public cipher key) on your computer, so everything that can be done on internets can be done in Yggdrasil without modification. It's a universal end-to-end encrypted and authenticated VPN, but the link only works when used with whoever else that is also connected to 'The Yggdrasil' at that time. This organism is a decentralized DHT swarm just like I2P, and it is implemented in the Go language. Basically its the same as I2P but it replaced the anonymizing layer with just P2P VPN. Clearnet.
A map of the yggdrasil network can be found at clearnet. The map would be different depending on from which nodes perspective you view the network, and evolves sometimes drastically over time. The mapping nodes primary routes cause the core to appear fragmented like an interference pattern.

Lokinet

LokiNet was sponsored by Dash, a cryptocurrency that supports hidden payments and hidden wallets, and LokiNet at least in the past shared some conceptual design with Dash, especially a crypto-capitalist proof of stake-security protecting against sybil attacks (Tor is not a decentralized network but relies on directory authorities, which protects against a sybil attack, and I2P somewhat recently gained the ability to at least automatically detect such an attack). However, the proof-of-stake scheme used by LokiNet requires a stake that has value, but since its free it does not really have value. Soo... I don't know. Anyways, it's somewhat similar to Tor, but forwards all kinds of packets through an IPv6 tun device or SOCKS5 proxy. Clearnet.


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