179 points | by udev40963 days ago
I used to check out the original version a few times in the past. I loved the overall premise of a uncensored network (for the context: I lived in an authoritorian country that doubled down on censoring online communications), but no system I've tried out (Freenet, ZeroNet, I2P, Tor) grew on me. Too much, uh, weird stuff (or worse), while interesting content was pretty sparse. And I don't produce anything worthy of sharing myself.
The tech could be there, but the society is not. [Not] surprisingly, the social demand seems to be all focused on to work around the Internet censorship with very limited interest in bootstrapping something that would be resistant. At scale, humans always pick the cheapest/lowest-effort option, even if it's obviously sub-optimal and even if it leads nowhere we want (or so I think) to be.
We’re also developing a decentralized reputation system based on the "web of trust" concept. This system is intended to help filter out antisocial content—like spam or worse—without relying on any central authority.
if you’re talking about the wider network - yes, there’s a subset of abusive users… just like on the web, or the internet, or email, etc. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about; it comes with the territory of being an open network where anyone can participate.
My experience of Matrix is more that it’s full of FOSS projects like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GNOME, KDE etc… as well as lots of government users. But ymmv. If you are still seeing abusive rooms as a matter of course, please route details to abuse@matrix.org, where we do actually act on them (if they are on servers we control)
Though I suppose if you search for other stuff you can find it.
Though it strikes me as a little odd, I never really associated matrix with anonymity, more with federation, end to end encryption, self hosting.
Perhaps hosting matrix servers as tor hidden services could serve that purpose.
Complaining that bad people are using Matrix is about as meaningful as complaining that bad people are driving on the highways or are filling their bathtubs with from the local water supply.
I wonder how someone must be using the platform, or how they're looking for rooms that might interest them, to get the impression that it's "mostly pedos and far right extremists or other weird anti social characters."
In that context the decision to avoid a chat application if you feel it is likely to put you at unnecessary risk where there are alternatives that will not is perfectly reasonable.
There are a lot of excuses for bad policy with the deflection of "at least I am not a far-right unperson".
A chat application usually cannot put me in any risk at all. Public personas might have different problems here, but the rules of PR aren't that new and these cases build a poor general case.
Fair to have the choice of a supervised chat app as long as people don't try to enforce all chat apps to adhere to arbitrary rules due to the latest outrage or panic over certain people, opinions, politics, bubble tea or whatever can be the source of ire.
I see it as a more of a chicken-and-egg issue. Publishers don’t come because there’s no audience, audience doesn’t come because there are no publishers. Plus, there is no recognition of distributed networks as a solution to censorship - the current non-enthusiast view of them ranges from “haven’t heard about it” through “tried it, found it useless” all the way to “it’s only for pedos and nazis”, which is extremely harmful for any meaningful and socially beneficial adoption, of course.
I’m not sure if those are the actual reasons. Certainly not a technical issue, though.
The Internet started out peer-to-peer, but client-server became dominant during the 90s when the Internet became mainstream - because at the time it was the only option for building services that scaled.
Freenet provides an alternative to the client-server architecture that doesn't require compromising on user experience or scalability.
Missing the forest for the trees.
The socio-economic problems are caused by the limitations & drawbacks of modern tech: It's too easy to centralize control over a platform, whilst keeping things decentralized requires an upfront desire to do so, along with the nightmare that is backwards compatibility.
> No new network could solve problems of monopolies and profit-greedy corporations.
It is a solvable problem. Monopolies & rent-seeking behaviors happen because the tech involved has chokepoints that favor centralized entities.
We know the business processes that should happen for running service X, based on our daily interactions with them and the idealized form of how they should work. Breaking the processes down into components & putting them onto a decentralized compute platform would significantly relax their control over common chokepoints. Dispute processes would be made as public as current government processes, ideally Estonian-like.
Could you please provide some examples?
It's too early to declare that complex socio-economic problems cannot be solved by a new network/infrastructure/etc. Software is one of the "socio-economical instruments" and we shouldn't dismiss its potential for social transformation beyond the control of banks, governments, corporations.
I played with Freenet when it first came out, but when I realized the implications of this -- which later turned out to be true -- I destroyed the hard drive I had been using to run Freenet, just in case.
Locutus seems less aggressive about caching data, but it still does some caching. Without really digging into the documentation or source code, I'd still be nervous about running it.
We're also planning a decentralized reputation system based on the concept of "web of trust" that should do at least as good a job of ensuring users aren't exposed to unwanted content like spam or worse.
It is great to have a tool that allows ideas to be shared, but I think that consent regarding which ideas are shared or promoted is important, not only from a legal perspective, but also from an ethical one.
Centralized services don't do a great job of this but I think we can do better with a decentralized approach.
We won't have a perfect solution overnight but we've already built important components of such a system (eg. ghost keys[1]).
German police did raid the home of a guy who ran a lot of Tor nodes. Authoritarians don't need any technical excuse to raid your home - they can just do it if they want to scare you away from these platforms, regardless of how they work.
I have no doubt that there was other evidence that led to the conviction of these individuals. But, I can only go on what I know, and what I know is that the standard of digital forensics evidence in those cases was subpar.
Either way, pretty funny when a software project has to tackle questions like "what is property in the modern era?" and "what is free speech?" in their FAQ. That's how you know you're really pushing against the status quo, I guess...
Platforms do their best to take care of this, but these scams are so easy to run that you can automate them and spin up new accounts very quickly. Even if there are financial barriers it can still be madly profitable to accept the costs.
There is no clear way to deal with the concerns you mentioned, but I think playing too safe and not exploring technology will quickly put you behind the curb. Most of it can be resolved with good financial regulation.
So, whichever represents a bigger threat to you is largely a question of circumstance.
That's an odd way of putting it, as if crypto scams were limited to the US.
I will admit that I didn't follow the renaming or possibly forking or whatever happened to freenet / hyphanet / etc back last when I was reading about this. If someone could explain it clearly that would be stellar.
The reasons for the renaming are addressed directly in Freenet's 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.
[1] https://freenet.org/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-and-r...
Guess it’s all in how you present things and what terms you avoid :)
For what it’s worth, I am interested very much in decentralized systems and smart contracts, having built them and also running a YouTube channel where I interviewed people behind the projects… including Ian Clarke and freenet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
Freenet stands apart with goals and ideals that are quite different from today’s distributed applications, with a stronger focus on privacy and access to information.
Neither Freenet nor Hyphanet are linked to cryptocurrencies or financial speculation. I see them as decentralized networks created to ensure freedom of expression, privacy, and access to information in an anonymous and censorship-resistant way, without any intrinsic connection to cryptocurrencies or financial systems. And that's great!
I also believe the project has gained a certain credibility over time, thanks to the consistent work and vision of its developers.
I’ll check out your interview with Ian Clarke!
Freenet is designed to be a general-purpose platform for building and distributing decentralized systems like group chat[1], social networks, search, really anything that people use the Internet for today. Some people think of blockchain this way but blockchain is much more specialized (eg. group chat on blockchain wouldn't scale).
After wondering why my laptop was loosing RAM for a few months, I realized I had been running a node continuously.
Great to see it's still alive though.
Their declaring their freedom and independance in a Matrix chat channel 8-)
This reminds me of the recent Guardian article headlined:
"Americans who believe in democracy have no choice but to vote for Harris"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/26/vote-k...
How can it be democracy if there's only one choice?
We'll migrate our channel from Matrix to River once it's working reliably.
I always thought the worst part of freenet was that it required java.
I haven't used freenet in a long time. Last time I did I'm pretty sure satoshi was posting the og bitcoin releases on the message board (freechat?). Crazy times.
Rust was the obvious choice when I started work on the new Freenet in 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
It is on our channel https://youtube.com/Intercoin where I tried for a few years to have really deep dives with some of the too people on technology, sociopolitics and regulations around decentralized systems.
In the late 1980s early 1990s, FreeNet was not (just) a web domain name.
Freenet was decentralized idea of how the public (me) could get on the internet without already being a member of a privileged institution (or rich and sophisticated).
I believe the idea of what the freenet was prior to becoming a brandname is worthy of being remembered.
I'm not much of a tube clicker here, so apologies if this is redundant with the video.
Services you create on Freenet will scale automatically and are immune to DDoS.
freenet overall is one of the most bandwidth and storage intensive platforms out there. I understand why -- but I say this as a means to say that it doesn't really deserve direct comparison to the open web. it's not the same thing, even if the work overlaps -- it's a lot more work.
As for bandwidth and storage, I think you’re referring to the old Freenet (now Hyphanet). The new Freenet is optimized for lighter services like group chat and isn’t designed for heavy data sharing like BitTorrent. It should be much less of a bandwidth hog.
However to host something yourself you need a lot of things, for example FTTH to host it at your home, or a hosting provider; then a domain name and other things. These can be taken away from you.
This is similar to a Bitcoin wallet although Freenet isn't a cryptocurrency, it's a general-purpose platform for building and distributing scalable decentralized services.
In practice, however, this didn’t quite work out. Most people publish through centralized services like Instagram, to name just one.
There are two main obstacles to achieving decentralization. The first is technical difficulty: not everyone wants to learn how to run a web server. The second is reliance on foundational services like domain names and hosting, which can be revoked. For example, if the authorities think you did something illegal, boom, your domain name got confiscated.
So, no, in practice, the World Wide Web isn’t truly decentralized. But at least there remains some possibility for it.
Non-hyperscaler server hosting is a pretty competitive business that doesn't need further decentralization at this time, though it's not a bad thing either.
Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access).
A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline.
This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.
"www is already decentralized", okay but not in reality, not even a little bit.
I mean, sure, packet routing is decentralized, and if you're a military operator, this might matter to you, if you're someone who wants a public voice it's not significant.
But the new transport layer is done, unit tests pass, simulations are working, and we're now cleaning up loose ends so this time I think we really are days or weeks away.
This[2] diagram hopefully gives a big-picture view of where Freenet fits in. You install the Freenet software (which is tiny, less than 10MB) and then you can access Freenet through your web browser just like with the world wide web. The difference is that there are no servers or datacenters, it's all decentralized.
Google video saying "Sign in to prove that you are not a bot"
Ian? Freenet? Really?
Am I a joke to you?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GbE3OkwWwAA25N_?format=jpg&name=...