This has been well known for a long time. It's even vaguely referenced in the Snowden leaks.
I wish Tor never became an activist project. There are a lot of groups with nice sounding names like 'Human Rights Watch' - that seem less nice once you find out who funds them and some of the things they support - that started offering loads of money starting around 2010 to groups which produced this kind of technology.
Tor took the money and transformed from an academic project into an activist one in both terms of both staff and marketing, and I think a lot of people are now using technology they have been told will keep them safe but is actually only a few steps away from bunkum.
I mean, I still like Tor. It depends entirely about what your threat models and goals are.
I2P never gets any attention compared to Tor, but it keeps chugging along. In many ways, it's a lot better. Their most recent release was on 2020-08-24.
I can't assess the merits of i2p but in the comment section of the post I found this
> i2p is substantially worse.
> It is worse BECAUSE every user is also a relay. I can sit at watch the connection, allowing me to map out each user's address. If your server is up long enough, you should see everyone eventually.
Really, it's just a different thing. It is an entirely P2P network, so yes, that's what you get. But, anybody can run a Tor node too, as the article points out. (Practically speaking, I2P better for torrents.)
I wish Tor never became an activist project. There are a lot of groups with nice sounding names like 'Human Rights Watch' - that seem less nice once you find out who funds them and some of the things they support - that started offering loads of money starting around 2010 to groups which produced this kind of technology.
Tor took the money and transformed from an academic project into an activist one in both terms of both staff and marketing, and I think a lot of people are now using technology they have been told will keep them safe but is actually only a few steps away from bunkum.