With the American election coming up, having a darknet that you can fall back to in case of political persecution is appealing to people who actually take the time to understand it. For many years, my idea of the "deep web" or darknets in general was Tor. Tor is certainly the more "normie friendly" darknet, you just open the browser and you're there. The problem I've found with Tor is that the nodes are purely for volunteers. This means you have the tech-savvy holding the entire network up, and at any point in the chain of nodes you could have a bad actor such as a government agency running their own. Out of the few tech-savvy people, most have just one or two voluntary nodes due to the cost and time of maintaining such a thing. A government agency could have hundreds to compromise. This is a fundamental flaw I find in Tor; Moreover, Tor was never designed with darknets in mind. Rather it's more like a free VPN to anonymize yourself on the clearnet with onion sites being something on the side.
Enter I2P, or the Invisible Internet Project. I first heard about I2P several years ago from a YouTube video, and looking into it I believe that it's a multifaceted savior of the internet. First of all, I2P uses a technique called garlic routing. Garlic routing encrypts traffic through the network multiple times and since I2P makes every user of the network a node (to use I2P you must set up what is effectively a router), the chances of a bad actor tainting the network is very hard. They would have to flood the network with routers (which, unless most people quit using I2P, will have almost zero chance of all belonging to them) and peel away multiple layers of encryption. It is a peer to peer network with multiple services that allows for file sharing, e-mail, chat, and easy eepsite (I2P website) creation.
Most eepsites give me a feeling of nostalgia. They're not usually that bloated because the network is peer to peer so it can be slow at times and it calls for simple websites. And because I2P takes some knowledge to setup, it filters out the people who shouldn't be using computers in the first place (this is quite literally what made the internet good in the beginning). Overall I2P saves the boring old internet. I would rather use I2P in its fullest due to its anonymous and chill nature than Tor or the clearnet.