I’m working on an idea for a communication app that is intentionally very different from Discord, Messenger, etc. The goal is a very lightweight P2P app with no accounts, usernames, permanent rooms, chat history, databases, or cloud infrastructure. Text would come first, with voice potentially added later. Ideally, the app would keep almost everything in RAM and disappear when the session ends.

The interesting part is connecting two people without a middleman. For example, Alice opens the app and generates a temporary connection invitation, then sends it to Bob through whatever external channel they already use, such as WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, or email. The connection information would not be sent as plain text, but the cryptographic side is a separate topic. What I’m trying to understand first is: **what is the minimum information actually needed for Bob’s computer to establish a direct connection to Alice’s computer?** Is it simply an IP, port, protocol, etc., or does it depend on the network situation?

The main reason I want to avoid a middleman is that I don’t want the communication to depend on infrastructure controlled by the app developer. Ideally, after the initial exchange, it would simply be Alice’s computer ↔ Bob’s computer, with no server carrying their messages or storing anything. I know NATs, firewalls, private IPs, and other networking issues make this difficult, so I’m interested in understanding where truly serverless P2P works and where it becomes impossible without some intermediary.

**TL;DR:** I want to build an extremely lightweight, ephemeral P2P chat app with no accounts, history, or central servers. Users exchange temporary connection information through an external channel, then the two computers try to connect directly. I want to understand the networking required to make this work without a middleman.

I plan to host an online chess tournament on the I2P network that allows computer assistance and features long time controls (given the high latency); it will be live-streamed, and the winner will earn a "GM" title displayed on the tournament website until the next event—I will go ahead with it if there is sufficient support.

I'm out of ideas. I tried Oracle. Open source Java. I tried uninstalling and installing the latest version. I tried updating after that- but every time I try to install I2P, I get the same error.

Does anyone know how to get passed this? At this point, I think there's just something critically wrong with the newest version of I2P's Windows installer. Does anyone have a link for older versions (as in, compatible with Windows)?

Any help is appreciated.

FIXED: It seems that newer versions of I2P's installer aren't compatible with Java 8 (free version). I downloaded an open-source java 26 from Adoptium- and i2p installed just fine.

So I'm currently trying to setup the sideband app on my pc and on my android phone., I have i2p installed on the PC and i2pd installed on the Android phone, sideband is installed on both.

sideband works fine over the Wi-Fi as expected, but the intention is to use it from the phone while on mobile data or other Wi-Fi networks.

so far I can't seem to get the i2p network to send the message over the data connection. I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into setting this up as so far it seems to be going over my head.

I can see the connections making SAM tunnels in the router consoles

The PC sideband keeps switching it i2p B32 address on ever restart and the android one isn't. I'm not sure if it should be static or changing honestly.

I was hoping to get the respect b32 for each reticulum session for sideband and use them as peers to try to direct the network but I can't seem to get the pc b32 to stay put after restart and I'm having a hard time finding where to put there peer in on the android app once it is a consistent b32.

Sorry if I don't know what I'm talking about very clearly, I only dove into this a few days ago and I'm very much a noob at this.

The pc i2p has been up for 40+ hrs while the android i2pd has been active for 18 hours+ so far.

Thank you to anyone you has any idea how to help.

**UPDATE**

editing the Advanced RNS configuration under utilities seems to have allowed me to input the b32 address into the android sideband app, just added an i2p interface block and peer.

**UPDATE**

So I finally got around to testing the last change, and it turns out it works. sideband is now routing the traffic over i2p, works with messages nicely and low rez pictures , high rez will take several minutes (probably 2-5) for a 700KB image so, definitely don't expect a lot out of it. but I knew that going in.

Still don't know if I locked down the b32 of the PC SIdeband app but if its not it means I'll just have to update the peer if Sideband restarts. I may end up moving it over to a Reticulum Daemon if I can find one so I don't have to worry about sideband closing and taking Reticulum with it.

hi im just trying to to the IRC (irc://127.0.0.1:6668/i2p) and librewolf keeps saying that the address is restricted and i was wondering how i could fix this to get to irc. i have tried making it an exception but that didnt work. im on debian13.

i am a noob in i2p working stuff, can anybody suggest me how can i increase the success rate to 90 or 80 , or any other suggestion ?

I'm thinking about making a router that'll sit online long-term, but I want to add HTTPS to my Webgui and to my proxy so my connection can't be MITM attacked. Is there a way to generate or import a self-signed cert or will I have to use a Reverse Proxy to do so? I know how to set the ip's to be different so I can access the router over a network, but I don't know how to add self-signed HTTPS.

This is unrelated to my other question, but it'd still be genuinely helpful. I wanna run a router 24/7 and run proxy rules and stuff.

I installed i2pd on a pi. I wanted to use it for IRC. I can't access channels because my VPN gets me banned from servers. I was under the impression I could use i2p to get around that. Seems I was mistaken. Was I?

In lieu of that I now have an always on garlic router. What uses have you found for it? Id like to get some use from it.

I'm not really interested in eepsites. How can I use this to increase privacy on my local network?

Thanks

I'm new and as you can see on the picture i've been launching I2PD for about 20min on fedora and it doesn't seem to run, my internet is at 300MBite/S

I've been thinking about this for a while and am beginning to research how I would do it, but, I'd like to have some guidance from some of the developers that have been working on I2P longer than me.

A key thing I want to think about is how many tunnels should be open at once and what type of peer discovery I should use, I'm new to this in general, I know I'll be ultimately using Samv3 as the API, and I'll likely be using the Rust implementation of I2P and that's about it.

For context, I want to make a distributed File System similar to IPFS. I have the resources for Samv3 and the resources for Libp2p, but I don't have a lot of information for building an Overlay network on top of I2P, I know BitTorrent possibly but that's about it.

I'd love to discuss about the networks internals as well, I'd like to understand it more thoroughly. I know of certain aspects of the network from talking to AI and I'm aware that I2P uses Static Bootstraping, Kademilla DHT, Rendezvous Protocol, and Address book sharing, so I know the types of peer discovery algorithms I2P already utilizes but I wanna have a more intimate or clearer idea of where I need to focus on integration wise.

I can go in more detail about my idea in the comments so that there's a clearer goal but I believe that it's relatively feasible.

My apologies if this message is an inconvenience or anything, I will admit I'm ignorant overall, but I have a genuine interest in learning more.

In retrospect I wonder if I should've tagged this Help instead, but I wanted to elaborate that I would also do a signature mechanism so when things are published you can use a public key to determine if the files have been tampered with and also possibly as a trust mechanism so trusted people's keys would have payloads that are more trusted and stuff.

So I keep randomly getting this error related to the jetty service. Weird thing is, it doesn't always happen. On some restarts the service does launch, but on most it doesn't and return the following error. How can I fix this problem? I'm using version 2.13 and I used the normal Windows installer to install i2p (didn't use the easy install bundle as that thing gives so many errors it is everything but easy).
I don't even know where to start with this one, as the results are seemingly randomly different every single time.
I have tried all the default problem solvers, like looking up the error, reinstalling and redoing everything, switching operating systems, switching pc's, switching versions, switching installers, restarting i2p itself, restarting the system, checking in a vm, etc. I've done pretty much everything that I could think off.

Through this testing I noticed that the linux java version (tested on Mint) doesn't have this issue, but no matter how many files I transferred I couldn't get my configurations ported over. If anybody knows how to transfer I2P Hidden Services to a different setup, such info would also be highly appreciated. (Yes I checked to make sure that I put all the right files in all the I2P folders that existed on the system, still didn't work :( Please save me from this debugging torture.)

Edit: I've also removed the cgi-context.xml file and it fixed (and did) nothing.

Full error:

23 Aug 2026, 02:27:44 CRIT  [er (eepsite)] uter.startup.LoadClientAppsJob: Error starting up the client class net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:74)
at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller(Constructor.java:499)
at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:483)
at net.i2p.router.startup.LoadClientAppsJob$RunApp.run(LoadClientAppsJob.java:308)
at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1474)
at net.i2p.util.I2PThread.run(I2PThread.java:103)
Caused by: org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfigurationException: Bad Jetty XML configuration in UNKNOWN-LOCATION
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:292)
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:266)
at net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart.parseArgs(JettyStart.java:158)
at net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart.<init>(JettyStart.java:92)
at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:62)
... 5 more
Caused by: java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException: C:\var\lib\i2p\i2p-config\eepsite\jetty.xml
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.translateToIOException(WindowsException.java:85)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.rethrowAsIOException(WindowsException.java:103)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.rethrowAsIOException(WindowsException.java:108)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsFileSystemProvider.newByteChannel(WindowsFileSystemProvider.java:231)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newByteChannel(Files.java:357)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newByteChannel(Files.java:399)
at java.base/java.nio.file.spi.FileSystemProvider.newInputStream(FileSystemProvider.java:371)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newInputStream(Files.java:154)
at org.eclipse.jetty.util.resource.Resource.newInputStream(Resource.java:233)
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:282)
... 9 more23 Aug 2026, 02:27:44 CRIT  [er (eepsite)] uter.startup.LoadClientAppsJob: Error starting up the client class net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:74)
at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller(Constructor.java:499)
at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:483)
at net.i2p.router.startup.LoadClientAppsJob$RunApp.run(LoadClientAppsJob.java:308)
at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1474)
at net.i2p.util.I2PThread.run(I2PThread.java:103)
Caused by: org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfigurationException: Bad Jetty XML configuration in UNKNOWN-LOCATION
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:292)
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:266)
at net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart.parseArgs(JettyStart.java:158)
at net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart.<init>(JettyStart.java:92)
at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:62)
... 5 more
Caused by: java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException: C:\var\lib\i2p\i2p-config\eepsite\jetty.xml
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.translateToIOException(WindowsException.java:85)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.rethrowAsIOException(WindowsException.java:103)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsException.rethrowAsIOException(WindowsException.java:108)
at java.base/sun.nio.fs.WindowsFileSystemProvider.newByteChannel(WindowsFileSystemProvider.java:231)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newByteChannel(Files.java:357)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newByteChannel(Files.java:399)
at java.base/java.nio.file.spi.FileSystemProvider.newInputStream(FileSystemProvider.java:371)
at java.base/java.nio.file.Files.newInputStream(Files.java:154)
at org.eclipse.jetty.util.resource.Resource.newInputStream(Resource.java:233)
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration.<init>(XmlConfiguration.java:282)
... 9 more

so recently I registered a domain and followed the instructions to the best of my ability on the i2p wiki for getting my own eepsite up and running with the jetty webserver. Currently that like goes to a 503 page, and I figure it could be because I only registered the domain with stats.i2p yesterday and it's still proliferating through the network but if not, where might I be going wrong? Feel free to ask clarifying questions if this is too vague, and I hope everyone's having a good day so far

I want to know if there is any bootstrap endpoint inside I2P that can be reliably hardcoded into i2p torrent client ? I believe BiglyBT hosts their own bootstrap end point URL, but I was looking for something inside i2p, which would be more safer for user.

There was this website, rmv.i2p, who recently was working. It stands for "Random Music Video" and simply picked a random music video. Recently, it was operational, but recently shutdown or seems to not be working. Any clue as to its whereabouts?

This version fixes five major issues with i2pbox, significantly improving reliability. I originally planned to rewrite it in Rust, but it's clear that some protocols would need to be reimplemented (the Rust version of the i2p router is still incomplete), which is risky. Therefore, I've decided to continue writing it in C++. Thanks to llm for his help. The code is open source, and issues and pull requests are welcome.

hi I just started install i2p on librewolf and most of it seems to be working I just have 0.00kib tunnels and I don't know how to fix it. any help would be appreciated. I'm on Debian 13

Hello everyone, i am known as Play_it in the clear as well as in the I2P net. A few months ago I started to run a smaller I2P outproxy service, which goes over a VPN into the clearnet. I am still developing it and sometimes the outproxy can go offline, but i try my best. What questions do you guys have about an outproxy and the technical stuff in the background?

Update: It has been some time, but i look here from time to time. So feel free to still ask questions.

Food and face-time for the I2P curious. Come meet the maintainer, have some zza, and cool off in the pool.

hello, I just wanted to know if using mullvad browser to access I2P is a good or bad idea in order to fight against fingerprinting

I have been looking for a tutorial all last night and haven't been able to find one, I also want to avoid using Firefox

I have latest 2.13.0 version.

Hi.

I noticed that 2.13 is out but that the easy install bundle in the downloads section just points back to the downloads section and the default install.

Is it supposed to be like that?

Hey folks,

After using i2p for a while I think it makes the most sense to run it on a low power SBC. I can get a raspberry pi if I need to but do any of you have any experience running i2p on any other SBCs? I just don’t fancy forking out the extra just because they’re a market leader, if possible. Cheers!

Hey all!
I have been experimenting with setting up an I2P fork of torrust tracker. Please try it out if you'd like to, and let me know how it goes!

Tracker URLs:
http://freetracker.i2p:7331/announce
udp://freetracker.i2p:1337/announce in progress

or

http://px7uban46x62n3iekxtt4qtdzhee6qu4j5xpbbyaqiruvva2mjha.b32.i2p:7331/announce
udp://px7uban46x62n3iekxtt4qtdzhee6qu4j5xpbbyaqiruvva2mjha.b32.i2p:1337/announce in progress

please keep content added to the tracker legal in the US. Linux ISOs and such.

I was wondering if anybody saw my website, i'm pretty new to i2p (started today) and set up a server on a raspberry pi 0 2 w (using i2pd on arch linux aswell)