Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).

The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine.

Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.

We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.

This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.

Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.

If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].

[1] https://github.com/freenet/river

[2] https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/

[3] https://freenet.org/quickstart/

[4] https://freenet.org/faq/

[5] https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0

Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team's work,

in favor of a rewrite from different developers, without asking anyone on the original team.

It was an ivory tower decision which was announced on the mailing list without prior discussion.

The old team did not agree, yet it was forced through by a decision of the "board".

The "board" was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

The funding of the existing, original "Freenet" was repurposed for the new one of course.

The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,

while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet" at:

https://www.hyphanet.org/

Yeah, I'm not a fan. Feels like this project is trying to get popular off of Freenet's name recognition rather than its own merits.

The submitter is the creator of the original Freenet. If anybody gets to decide what we will call Freenet, it’s him.

Does he though?

they most def have a choice as to what to broadcast about..

>while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet"

Well, that name pretty much dooms the project to a slow death in obscurity.

> Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team's work,

This is a false narrative, from the Freenet FAQ[1]:

Why was Freenet rearchitected and rebranded?

In 2019, Ian began developing a successor to the original Freenet, internally named “Locutus.” This redesign was a ground-up reimagining, incorporating lessons learned from the original Freenet and addressing modern challenges. The original Freenet, although groundbreaking, was built for an earlier era.

This isn’t the first time Freenet has undergone significant changes. Around 2005, we transitioned from version 0.5 to 0.7, which was a complete rewrite introducing “friend-to-friend” networking.

In March 2023, the original Freenet (developed from 2005 onwards) was spun off into an independent project called “Hyphanet” under its existing maintainers. Concurrently, “Locutus” was rebranded as “Freenet,” also known as “Freenet 2023,” to signal this new direction and focus. The rearchitected Freenet is faster, more flexible, and better equipped to offer a robust, decentralized alternative to the increasingly centralized web.

To ease the transition the old freenetproject.org domain was redirected to hyphanet’s website, while the recently acquired freenet.org domain was used for the new architecture.

It is important to note that the maintainers of the original Freenet did not agree with the decision to rearchitect and rebrand. However, as the architect of the Freenet Project, and after over a year of debate, Ian felt this was the necessary path forward to ensure the project’s continued relevance and success in a world far different than when he designed the previous architecture.

> The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,

Because the new Freenet will have a menu of anonymity options rather than committing to a one-size-fits-all approach, while also addressing the issue of illegal content[2].

[1] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected...

[2] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...

> and after over a year of debate

There was no "year of debate".

You came to the mailing list and announced it for the first time as a finalized decision already,

without any prior debate with the original team.

The "board" you cited as the body which allegedly discussed it did neither join the mailing list discussion,

nor were you willing to hand out their contact info.

It's all public for anyone to see on the mailing list archive:

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/

WTF. These are some of the first things I clicked through on that page:

- https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5534...

Gee, I can't imagine how that mailing list could ever be toxic.

Lol. It's like Linus but crunchier

I'm told I kinda look like him too. There are worse people to be compared to.

Not sure what you mean but I stand by every word I said in that thread.

> The woke mind virus, more formally postmodern neo-marxism, is the greatest threat to civilization today.

"The woke mind virus" really? You used that non-ironically? This is not something a serious or sane person would say for real.

A wise boss of mine, after reading a set of threads that I wrote like this, asked me to go think for a day on the difference between "being right" and "being effective."

Some of the things you say in these threads might be "right" but I can assure you that many of them are not effective, which is counterproductive to the goal you are trying to achieve.

I prefer to say what I believe to be true rather than live in fear of how people looking to take offense might misconstrue something.

A culture where people are expected to constantly self-censor to avoid bad-faith interpretations is unhealthy and corrosive.

I, for one, don’t think I’ve misconstrued anything — you’ve shown exactly who you are relatively clearly in those posts.

Sure, then just avoid me and I'll avoid you and we'll both be happier.

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If you think this is a correct communication style for someone who thinks they're a leader, I suggest getting an assistant to write your correspondence, or maybe some socialisation bootcamp.

This is grim.

If you stand by it I'd say good.... luck, yeah, good luck, you're singlehandedly the gravest enemy of the project.

Yes, I stand by what I wrote. I'm not going to pretend otherwise because someone dug up an old mailing list post.

If you think a specific statement was wrong, harmful, or dishonest, then explain why. I'll wait.

Holy shit. I’m a long-time admirer of freenet and you just single handedly destroyed any positive view of the project I may have held. Get a fucking grip and seek help if you can’t.

Sounds like you should get out more.

What? I don’t understand.

He's telling you to go and touch grass

> There was no "year of debate".

Incorrect, I raised the issue with the lead maintainer over a year prior to that announcement.

> You came to the mailing list and declared it as a finalized decision.

As the project's architect I'm entitled to make decisions about the project's future direction.

> It's all public for anyone to see on the mailing list archive:

> https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

I stand by every word I said in that mailing list thread.

> Incorrect, I raised the issue with the lead maintainer over a year prior to that announcement.

The previous lead maintainer, Steve, voiced their frustration with your decision here:

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

To which you sent a brash reply, which sounds like you don't know Steve's position in the community:

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

To which the current lead maintainer, Arne, said he agrees with the sentiment of Steve:

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

So if you discussed this with Arne for a year, then why does he agree with the frustration of Steve?

And even if the discussion with Arne happened, it still was a backroom decision:

Two people are not representative on a project with plenty of developers and an active community.

> As the project's architect I'm entitled to make decisions about the project's future direction.

A sense of entitlement is not a leadership quality.

A leadership quality would be to admit a mistake:

That repurposing the name was not only bad for the original project,

but also for the new one (because these discussions will haunt it forever),

and to then rename the new project to a fresh name which no other software used before.

As the FAQ explains, the existing maintainers didn't agree with my decision, but I stand by it - particularly in light of the fact that we now have a working decentralized group chat on the new Freenet, something that the old architecture could never have supported.

Whether or not it was the right decision will be determined by the outcomes, which so far are promising, because we have a working network that does things that the old architecture could never do.

For anyone confused, link is cited badly and mail did not get deleted.

https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...

seems freenet is not free after all, maybe a rebrand to ianet would be more appropriate

> This is a false narrative, from the Freenet FAQ[1]:

I'm sorry, but nothing following that even comes close to proving that it's a false narrative. Quite the opposite actually.

To be fair, I see some goodwill, e.g.:

> To ease the transition the old freenetproject.org domain was redirected to hyphanet’s website, while the recently acquired freenet.org domain was used for the new architecture.

So in that aspect it seems more user friendly than a hard fork.

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I'm very glad to hear that—the anonymity of the original Freenet has led to it being a very unsavory place that was more well known for CSAM then anything positive or useful. As an outsider, it sounds like this new direction is the right choice for Freenet to try and attract new users and fulfill the team's original goals.

Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for, and freely speaking can result in all kinds of repressions.

And even without agreeing on whether people should be anonymous on the Internet,

it could be agreed that replacing a software which guards against a certain threat model (repressions) with one which does not,

without changing the name, is not exactly a wise decision.

The new Freenet will support the creation of anonymity systems as services on top of it, which is much better architecturally than tying the platform to one approach to anonymity as I did when I designed the original Freenet.

We will also have a decentralized reputation system that will protect people from being exposed to unsavory or illegal content, a common criticism of the old Freenet architecture.

> Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for

I’m not a fan of “think of the children“ arguments but the Internet cannot actually be a complete free for all and “freedom of speech” is not some magic shield that overrides all other ethical considerations. CSAM is not a particularly high bar and frankly if you want people to throw in with you then you can’t brush it off so lightly.

So he forked the project and went his own way. I am not sure I see the issue here. This is how we do open source on the internet. You don't have to join him, but he also has the right to go his own way too.

The issue is that the original name, "Freenet", was repurposed for a different codebase.

Different codebase, same purpose.

This isn't even the first time we did a ground-up redesign/rewrite of the Freenet codebase, we did this in 2008 with the 0.7 release.

Should've called the new one Freenet 2 or Freenet NT.

Freenet 3.11 for Workgroups

Freenet++

Repeating a bad decision does not make it any wiser.

History will be the judge, and so far it's looking very promising given our progress.

[dead]

No komrade...

It feels like the state merging approach just pushes the hard problems onto the user, without giving them the tools to solve those problems properly.

Imagine an application where an authorized group of users can create and vote in polls, using cryptographic signatures and public/private keys for user verification.

What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?

Blockchains solve this by having state get more authoritative as blocks age. To undo the `poll_didnt_reach_quorum` state transition from 2024, one would have to rewind all blocks that have been created since, and PoW / PoS ensures that this is incredibly costly to do.

On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?

Appreciate the feedback.

> It feels like the state merging approach just pushes the hard problems onto the user, without giving them the tools to solve those problems properly.

We've created many of these tools, and have used them to implement practical applications like group chat, a CMS, and a social network, and we and others will build many more tools over time. Designing applications for Freenet can require some creative problem solving, but each problem only needs to be solved once.

> What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?

You could solve this similarly to Bitcoin by having a mechanism that "locks" poll results at a particular point in time to prevent subsequent additions, analogous to how mining repeatedly locks in the blockchain.

> On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?

Peers in the network track cost/benefit of each connected peer, so if a peer starts to consume a lot more resources than it provides then its neighbors will disconnect, a kind of immune response.

I'm sure that once the network is big enough to attract large-scale attacks we'll need to adapt our approach, but I think we have a solid starting point.

Neat. I've been wanting to see WASM-defined network behavior like this for a while (yay arbitrary consistency algorithms!), I'll have to explore it in more detail :)

(the main thing I've been wanting to try: rather than graphql, send a WASM blob along with your request to a server, and just run it to filter fields in the response / pipeline requests / define "fail if any err / pair errors with requests" for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)

Thank you, that's actually an idea I considered a while ago - embed some wasm in a GET request (which retrieves complete contract state from the network) that could pre-process the state before returning it to the requestor.

The issue was that Freenet requires that intermediate peers can cache the contract state as they're passing it back to the requestor so in the end I decided against it, but might revisit in the future.

yea, there's a lot of scenarios it doesn't make sense in imo. and even with processing-gas-limits it's still kinda weird and harder to prevent abuse on (e.g. you can't predict costs because you don't know what requests it might send next - graphql's declarative approach helps it here).

but for e.g. mobile apps with a trusted backend? probably great. you could even just send hashes of the WASM blobs because they will often be identical (and the full blob if that fails), and some serialized data to serve as args that vary (e.g. page-size limit of the third internal request), and you'd have an absurdly flexible system with fairly small requests. I'm just not sure how small, or if it'd end up computationally worth it compared to graphql / sparql / etc.

I think better approach for "ghost keys" would be requiring X amount of crypto to be sent to 0x0 (burning). Current implementation (requiring donation to freenet) basically gives freenet foundation infinite reputation (including any other potential project that would accept ghost keys as identity), kinda breaking the decentralization aspect

Ghost keys will ultimately be just one of a menu of options for bootstrapping reputation in a decentralized reputation system. They have the advantage of simplicity, anonymity, and helping to fund the project, but as you correctly point out - they are centralized.

A cryptocurrency-based solution like you suggest will undoubtedly be one of a menu of reputation bootstrapping options that will develop over time.

Reputation systems have been a theoretical idea for a while, but we haven't come up with anything sybil-proof without centralized identity management. "we have a menu" sounds a lot like "we don't actually have any viable plan" in this case.

Don't get me wrong, this is awesome. I think it is built on a subtlety bad premise. I think it is time to start build organizational nomic games on this sort of contract system, literal organization governance, for systems like this to thrive.

There are tons of sybil-proof systems if you don't include signal from sources by default, but instead opt them in by hand. E.g. use a web of trust and then choose who you trust. It doesn't matter if there are trillions of accounts you don't trust, because you don't trust them.

Which isn't a web of trust. it is just an "allowlist". Humans are vulnerable to sybil attacks too.

An allow-list with transitive trust is a web of trust. And I said "use a web of trust", not "use an allow-list", because I really did mean "web of trust".

And sure, they can be, if they adopt patterns that allow it. I can also find plenty of counter-examples. I don't think "humans are less vulnerable to sybil attacks than automated systems" is a weakly-defensible stance at all.

For values that don't have a natural merge function (or where you don't want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead? That is:

- The synced value is a history of client updates, sorted in some eventually consistent order (e.g. by hybrid logical clocks). Merging takes the union of the update sets.

- The user-visible value is the result of processing these updates in order, using arbitrary contract code.

This is overkill for simple last-writer-wins values, but it lets you support fairly general data types & arbitrary update functions, including ones that preserve application-specific invariants.

The Automerge CRDT library works like this already [1][2], but it only allows specific updates to JSON data. Sharing code via your contracts solves the hard part of generalizing that to arbitrary data & updates.

[1] https://automerge.org/

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04263

> For values that don't have a natural merge function (or where you don't want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead?

Yes, in fact you can implement this within the current framework, for example with our group chat River, each room state maintains a list of the N most recent messages sorted by (approximate) timestamp.

The idea is that you can adapt the merge logic to the needs of the specific application, and I think a time ordered event log will be a common pattern.

How does it work in practice? Is it sorted by timestamp and content hash for uniqueness?

Messages in river are sorted by timestamp using a (non-cryptographic) hash of the message signature as tie-breaker, essentially a content hash.

One weakness is that we trust the message author to provide an accurate message timestamp, however bad behavior such as manipulating timestamps can be addressed by banning the user from the room.

Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.

For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.

Why would you want to exchange private messages with anonymous counterparties?

- You participate in a secret cabal, and don't want participants' identities be visible to each other.

- You're a journalist, and want to give your informants in sensitive matters, or from oppressed countries, a way to securely interact with you, so that you won't be technically capable of reporting their identities.

- You're selling illegal goods or services.

I'd say that in the first two cases I would consider running a separate copy of the network, because it apparently involves one supernode, and I might want to control the supernode (or maybe not).

Our intention is that Freenet will only consume surplus resources, but we plan to build a reputation system that could have a notion of "karma" that is earned by providing resources to the network. This karma could be used to gate access to resources, for example like a VIP chat room on River.

So there are a lot of possibilities but for now users are motivated by a desire to see the network succeed, and that seems to be a sufficient motivator at our current scale.

Seems reasonable to build a cryptocurrency around this. The network could pay the cryptocurrency out to users dedicating resources. Have you thought about that?

Ghostkeys seem like part of a decent approach to this, since it's a "prove contribution without dictating how" system. Crypto/cash/"they gave me a high five, they're cool" are all equally valid, and it's not a proof of work that costs substantial money to operate: https://freenet.org/ghostkey/

Currently it appears centralized, but in principle it'd be pretty easy to shift it to a web of trust instead, and hosts can choose what they allow and how much they value it.

(zero-knowledge proofs seem probably rather important to adopt tho, as right now it'll tie you to a stable pseudonym)

You'd still need to solve the double-spend problem, because while contract state on Freenet will usually synchronize within a few seconds, it isn't guaranteed to converge to a single globally consistent state.

Freenet's approach works well for things like group chat, where temporary inconsistency is mostly just an irritation, but for a cryptocurrency it is fatal.

I'm not saying you couldn't build a cryptocurrency on Freenet, but you'd still need a solution to that problem.

Cryptocurrencies have a toxic reputation. Associating one to this project is a sure path to killing it.

Very cool project!

> We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.

Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?

> Very cool project!

Thank you!

> Where can I learn more about this?

If you don't mind watching a video I gave this talk back in March that should be fairly comprehensive: https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0?si=R4ifrsfEUJfvjDPx

If you would prefer an article I recommend: https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/

> How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?

It's very closely related, you can view Freenet contract state as a CmRDT, where the details of the merge operation are specified in the webassembly contract.

Thanks!

It looks a lot like a CvRDT (i.e. a state-based CRDT).

They describe it as a commutative monoid, which means it has associativity and commutativity. CvRDTs also need idempotence, so they can handle duplicate data. Either they are idempotent too (which would make it semilattice-like), or the network protocol handles the deduplication outside of the data itself.

Letting the payload/application define the merge operation is clever. I assume it would mean contracts could opt in to idempotency if it doesn't already exist.

The other bit Freenet has added is doing all this with DHT routing and subscriptions, rather than a more basic peer mesh. This is very different to a blockchain and means it probably isn't suited for anything transactional.

This is broadly correct.

> CvRDTs also need idempotence, so they can handle duplicate data. Either they are idempotent too (which would make it semilattice-like), or the network protocol handles the deduplication outside of the data itself.

Freenet's summary/delta synchronization mechanism implicitly disregards duplicate updates. The idea is that a peer A creates a "summary" of a contract's state which is sent to the other peer B which then creates a "delta", which contains anything in B's state that isn't in A's state. The delta is then sent from B to A bringing A's state up-to-date. Thus the contract defines a custom synchronization mechanism for its state which can be very efficient.

These summaries and deltas are just arbitrary bytes as far as the framework is concerned, their meaning is entirely up to the contract.

> The other bit Freenet has added is doing all this with DHT routing and subscriptions, rather than a more basic peer mesh. This is very different to a blockchain and means it probably isn't suited for anything transactional.

That's correct, Freenet doesn't guarantee a global consensus although in practice contract states will converge within a few seconds. This is good enough for applications like group chat and social networks but for a cryptocurrency you still need to solve the double-spend and global ordering problems.

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I'm also curious about this. I don't understand how deletion and modification can be made commutative operations in a way that makes sense

tombstones are sorta the default answer here (i.e. at simplest, you keep all data forever so you can merge correctly, but you hide anything where you've seen a tombstone after it).

but "makes sense" and ways to optimize that can change massively with context. e.g. for a chat app, as soon as you see "deleted message X", you can reasonably drop X and all past and future changes to X because they won't be shown by anyone (don't even need to sync them). if you do that with "deleted chars 87..93" in a text editor, past-edits that you receive in the future might affect the behavior (it might add chars before those, changing what that range means), so you can't simply forget those chars (e.g. an easy option is to replay all events that occur after an event syncs, but that means retaining all events forever). the semantics you choose and what you do with the data affect your outcomes a lot.

tbh this is one of the reasons I like the idea of a WASM-defined algorithm. no one algorithm will be "best" for all data, and the storage/computation/transmission savings can be extreme.

Exactly, well put.

For a basic CRDT set, merge rules have to have some kind of temporality basis in the messages such that commutativity is preserved. usually it's a timestamp, sometimes it's an unforgeable value like a hash, e.g. A: { "prev_hash": null, "content": "foobar" } B: { "prev_hash": "<hash of A>", "content": "foobarbaz" } C: { "prev_hash": "<hash of B>", "content": "foobaz" }

and when played out of order, it's guaranteed to resolve to foobaz eventually or immediately, depending on when messages are received

when you encounter the scenario of a fork, there's usually a fork resolution rule, e.g. D: { "prev_hash": "<hash of B>", "content": "foobazbar" }

to resolve C vs D, sort lexicographically, choose direction of sort order and pick first

When you have non-continuous data due to messages dropping, e.g. you have B and perhaps an E that builds on C, you can either use the same lexicographic rule, or make the hash basis a combination of timestamp and hash, so you get temporality and lineage.

As for deletes, you have either the single set approach of simply making the message content empty and that _is_ the delete, or you have the 2-phase sets, where there exists an add set and a delete set.

Quite a few ways to approach it, but commutativity can be readily preserved.

It depends on the nature of the data, for example in our group chat app River[1] it stores the most recent messages - deleting the oldest to make room for the newest as necessary. Banning a user will remove them from the members list along with their messages, and recently banned users are stored in a banned list (like a tombstone).

So there is no one approach to this, rather you design the approach based on the application, and since contracts are just webassembly they are extremely flexible.

[1] https://github.com/freenet/river

Looks very interesting! I stumbled across your webpage a few months ago while looking into the state of peer-to-peer. Glad to see p2p projects are still active.

It's refreshing to see people doing something conceptually interesting outside of the LLM domain.

I definitely think we should be exploring decentralized approaches to services we use.

I also would like to see an emphasis on local-first approaches.

This experiment, in the spirit of UNIX, composes git and text files to form a social network:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social

Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI

Interesting, we've also experimented with hosting git repos on Freenet, see: https://github.com/freenet/freenet-git

This is cool!

OK, time for inception... 9social on freenet-git

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Very interesting. I have been working on something quite some time, where something like this would play a very crucial role, but i never got around to really thinking about how to implement everything. And as I have still a lot of work to do on my project, that would utilize something like freenet, i am very eager to dive into your work. Just wanted to write this as some form as appreciation for your work.

I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?

Great work it seems, so far. I will yet have to really look through it all. Congratulations on this.

Thank you!

> I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?

While I realize this is wildly ambitious, my goal is that Freenet could ultimately replace the world wide web and the client-server architecture more generally which I view as inherently concentrating power in the hands of a few (which it has done).

This is awesome. I rotated some ideas like this in my head a while ago but never had the motivation to put it together. Happy to see more types of protocols like this.

Looks very intersting, congratulations for the launch and wishing you good Luck!

Thank you!

I wrote a short University essay on Freenet in 1998 I think it was... I may still have the document somewhere. Good stuff, very pioneer!

Unfortunately, this is an effectively unrelated project.

That project had nothing to do with the freenet that ran after 2006 either. It's not the first ground up rewrite with major breaking changes using the same name.

Not sure how you can say it's unrelated given that it was created for the same purpose by the same person with many design similarities.

ELI5, how is this different than the internet?

Imagine an internet that is fundamentally decentralized, where your online presence isn't at the mercy of a company like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Think of it as going back to the Internet's decentralized roots.

Is there any way to run this in the browser rather than downloading an app?

Not currently, but installation is very quick - the binary itself is just 10MB.

I am thinking about making a public proxy available so people can try the network itself without installing it, but we've made installation as quick and painless as possible.

There's also https://internetcomputer.org/

I wrote a web browser for Freenet called Snarfzilla. I guess it may have been the first web browser for "the dark web". [1]

I integrated "Fair Tunes", which tried to pay musicians for mp3 files, long before any label was selling mp3's.

(Edit: I just remembered Freshmeat automatically rejecting Snarfzilla because they were so sick of projects ending in *zilla. The owner thought it was cool and added it after I emailed. No idea why I used 'snarf'. I've never said it out loud.)

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/snarfzilla/

Can this be used to sync the data of an app from mobile to desktop without a server ? And vice-versa.

In principle but we don't yet support mobile except experimentally, in part due to mobile OS restrictions (eg. iOS apps can't embed webassembly).

Any reason this can't be compiled to wasm and run in browsers that way? Networking (protocol) issues?

Ed: I guess you'd need a way to run wasm in wasm, and a way to author wasm contracts - and there's not yet a wasm-hosted rust compiler?

But not a problem in theory for Android and Ubuntu Touch systems?

Yes, iOS is the main headache. The other issue is that people probably won't want it using their mobile network bandwidth in the background, but that's solvable.

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Big fan of this project. Three years ago, I interviewed Ian Clarke about his upcoming Freenet rewrite. He's the original "OG" of decentralized content networks. We go into detail regarding its architecture on the podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

Can you tell me about the old Freenet? I've read up on Wikipedia and it seems to be very much in the line with the 90s/2000s p2p file sharing software. Except that you can store stuff on other people's computers and it's encrypted?

Which then led to people storing Bad Stuff, and this is somehow addressed in the new version? (I also read some stuff about friends and trust in the previous one, but haven't looked into properly.)

I think understanding the old one and the issues it ran into would be helpful for understanding the context, and the motivations for the changes.

Or to put it very bluntly: what is this, why should I care, and why not just use the old one?

Thanks

> Or to put it very bluntly: what is this, why should I care, and why not just use the old one?

If you don't mind I'll quote the FAQ[1]:

The previous and current versions of Freenet have several key differences:

Functionality: The previous version was analogous to a decentralized hard drive, while the current version is analogous to a full decentralized computer.

Real-time Interaction: The current version allows users to subscribe to data and be notified immediately if it changes. This is essential for systems like instant messaging or group chat.

Programming Language: Unlike the previous version, which was developed in Java, the current Freenet is implemented in Rust. This allows for better efficiency and integration into a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, MacOS, etc).

Transparency: The current version is a drop-in replacement for the world wide web and is just as easy to use.

Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.

> Which then led to people storing Bad Stuff, and this is somehow addressed in the new version? (I also read some stuff about friends and trust in the previous one, but haven't looked into properly.)

The new version doesn't claim to provide anonymity as part of the platform itself although anonymity systems can be built on top of it. I'd also refer you to this FAQ [2].

[1] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-do-the-previous-and-curre...

[2] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...

Is this similar to how Napster worked?

I thought Gnutella was a bit more like Freenet than Napster, iirc only the bootstrap was centralized.

Yes in the sense that users pool resources for the network, but no in the sense that Napster relied on a centralized database of content - whereas Freenet is entirely decentralized.

Also Freenet is much more general, you could think of Napster like a shared hard drive, whereas Freenet is like a shared computer capable of running decentralized applications like group chat, social networks, search engines, etc.