Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

It's sad but I think in most modern democracies that are relatively free, like the USA and EU, the primary use for these services is CSAM. There's no other reason to use it, except maybe paranoia or technical curiosity, and only the former will keep someone using it. The technically curious will move on quite quickly.

P2P was mostly about piracy. NNTP was used before that. BBS's were before that. And what comes next? IPFS?

So instead keep using it and actually put the other content onto it yourself!

Hosting on Freenet is free and easy, you just upload a site and post it to FMS and it will be online for many years if people keep accessing it.

You don't need any server whatsoever: The machines of the other users store content which you upload (in an encrypted fashion so they cannot censor it and aren't legally culpable for it). It automatically gets replicated to more machines as it becomes more popular, thus good content stays available for a very long time and unpopular content gets garbage-collected.

So put your "money", i.e. effort, where your mouth is:

Don't just only constantly criticize FAANG for lack of privacy and censorship.

Instead, also take care of actively maintaining the spaces which provide privacy & freedom so they don't become barren.

A free public space which is only controlled by the general public needs the general public to take care of it.

Censorship shouldnt be the central focus. The real hope is that from 1000 ranking algorithms, we can find one that isn't a divisiveness amplifier

It's not like we're immune to this in the west, didn't you see the censorship on all the social media recently?

Do you remember the early internet? The Internet before JavaScript, ads, and commercialization was everywhere? Do you remember surfing through homemade webpages that someone put a lot of thought and effort into? Do you remember usenet? Do you remember not even imagining that some corporation or government was collecting your data in-bulk?

That's Freenet. It's the internet that should have been.

I came for the memes and I stayed for the community. FMS and WoT (Freenet Message System and Web of Trust) use trust lists to decide what I see and most people who use FMS and Sone (sort of like Twitter) are decent. Pedo's and generally bad people typically use Frost-Next, a third party application that the Freenet Project does not endorse that is susceptible to spam. I have had so many in-depth, thought-provoking discussions on FMS over the years. Far more than any other clearnet website today, Reddit included. There is a real sense of community on Freenet you'll be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

I enjoy making websites and writing. Freenet hosts numerous websites (freesites) I have made over the years and a ton of my political and philosophical writings. I just finished making a Super Mario 64 Freesite in honor of one of my favorite video games. I spent a lot of time working on it and I'm proud of it. That's just for Freenet. I live in the United States too, and this is what I use Freenet for. I also host the Astronomy Picture Of the Day freesite I update everyday. You don't have to need censorship resistance to use Freenet, it's existence merely safeguards the prerequisite to all real civil liberties in the digital age-- privacy. I am convinced that the existence of Freenet and tools like it (especially Tor) are necessary for a free society to exist.

I2P is great too and I'm just as passionate about that, though it's been awhile since my servers have been up. Same philosophy of censorship resistance, but with I2P you have to run a server 24/7 to host content and can have dynamic content as well. Freenet is more distributed. I2P is like Tor but is more used by nerds than criminals. Both I2P and Freenet are amazing tools. I highly recommend people to check them out.

(Well you can, but you shouldn't want to, will explain below.)

Freenet is a datastore: It addresses content, not computers.

So a Freenet address points to a file or a directory of files (a zip). The addresses can be versioned so files/dirs can be updated.

A file/dir may be stored anywhere in Freenet. Where it is stored is not known - the machines which store it are anonymous so censorship is prevented. If many people request a file, it will get stored on more machines automatically.

Now of course you can make a specific computer constantly publish new versions of a file to "send" data like on IP and poll for a remote file to receive data. This can emulate direct connections and does work.

But it invalidates the whole point of Freenet:

Freenet wants to be censorship-resistant, so content should not rely on a single computer to keep existing because that is a single point of failure.

- use a VPN from a net-neutral ISP to obtain a real public IP address over VPN (5-10€/mo)

- route specific ports to your own machine from an internet-facing server (via SSH/Wireguard/VPN tunnels) ; unfortunately it makes it impossible for different people (backend servers) to share a single routable port

- reverse proxy specific protocols to a backend server, using for example TLS SNI (or eSNI) headers ; a single internet-facing server can serve many different vhosts to separate backends, where TLS encryption is terminated on the backend

But of course you can run tor/i2p and other crypto-secure routing protocols (yggdrasil, zeronet, cjdns...) to expand the ways to reach your server. I'm unaware of good protocol-agnostic address discovery... for tor we usually do TOFU over DNS (eg. onionMX records) or HTTPS (HTTP2 Alt-SVC headers). The GNU Name System, at least on paper, sounds like the perfect crypto-secure naming scheme that could securely bootstrap addresses from names, but i don't think it has broad adoption yet.

But how will they read it if even you can't?

And even if law enforcement could successfully convince a court that you're doing something illegal by hosting data which you cannot look into:

They couldn't first acquire the necessary search warrant because they couldn't prove that you are the one who is hosting the particular piece of illegal data: Freenet's routing algorithm is anonymized, both the people who retrieve data and the people who store it are anonymous. (Disclaimer: The security of the anonymization depends on how you've configured Freenet. In the less secure modes a well-funded attacker can de-anonymize you.)

So if law enforcement knows a certain file is evil then they cannot easily find out the IP addresses of the people who store it, and the people who store it don't know that they are doing so.

Hence it is censorship-resistant :)

You're only going to have a few encrypted chunks of a given file in your datastore, you don't know what the file chunks are when put together or the key used to decrypt it. Information is neutral on Freenet. You would NOT get in trouble just for running a Freenet node in any sane/ free country in the world. If you go out of your way to use Freenet for something illegal, that's another matter entirely.

If you're paranoid, just use a VPN or install it to a VPS and SSH into it.

-- i2p was originally a fork of freenet

-- Freenet was designed and conceived as a datastore, fist and foremost, whereas i2p using 'garlic routing' was apt for any IP protocol proxied over it (a bit like tor)

-- Freenet therefore is more efficient and distributing popular data

-- There are some concerns about the algoirthms behind freenet's anonymity, which i2p claims [1] are troublesome.

-- Incidentally, I have heard complaints about the crypto behind i2p, but I am not expert in this area enough to comment. My understanding is that the consensus is that "tor r is better", but note you can e.g. run freenet over tor if desired.

I played with both as a curious teenager around the time they were released. I am now largely terrified to, because of the prospect of accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very high on both platforms.

[1] https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet

[1] https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd

To answer your question, better? Neither I2P nor Freenet claim to be inherently better than the other. It depends entirely on what you are using Freenet or I2P for.

I2P is like Tor but internal (it does not mainly anonymize clearnet traffic, think onionland) and it is anonymous by default. How anonymous? Theoretically as anonymous as Tor. You can use I2P for torrents and filesharing, pretty fast irc, etc. To host an eepsite (I2P site) you have to run a server and keep it running as long as you want the site to be up, similar to running a Tor hidden service or any server on the clearnet.

Freenet has a lot more static content (no JavaScript), reminds one of the early internet (in a good way, mostly). Hosting of freesites (Freenet sites) and files is distributed, no need to run a server to have your site up. There is no 'delete' button on Freenet either. Files/ sites are deleted when no one accesses them for a time. Popular content stays forever. Sites under 2MB in size typically stay forever. Freenet is not anonymous by default, you need to know people IRL who use it to create a friend-to-friend darknet for it to be anonymous. I use mine with a VPN.

Both networks are great, lots of cool people use them. I use FMS a lot (Freenet Message System, similar to Usenet) and Sone. When I use I2P I usually host a few eepsites and hang around Irc2p (I2P's irc). I recommend installing and using both. They're both great.

Point in case: On Freenet it does. But I had to close down my youtube comments on my channel completely when they discovered my youtube-Account. Because it’s the clearnet where moderation sucks.

Its actually scaling, fully decentralized moderation system is how Freenet keeps communication friendly with actual pseudonymity and privacy protection: https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communicatio...

If the question is WHO to censor, I've always thought the solution is not at the server side but on the client side. Any platform where sensitive topics are being discussed (conspiracies for example) is going to be spammed, trolled, forum slided, etc. The solution is to have filtering on the client side take away the spam. Similar to how you have ad lists which block adsense, googleanalytics, etc. Allow ALL speech, and then filter out just the ones you want. Much better than having a tyrannical government or corrupt media or powerful tech giants do it for me.

So I don't know how you get the impression that "public servers are off limits"?

It is possible that CSAM exists in certain forums on Freenet which might indicate the specific goal of sharing CSAM by their name.

But if it were to be posted into non-CSAM forums then the community's web of trust would flag it as spam and thus make it disappear. So you're unlikely to just run into CSAM involuntarily.

Also, IMHO saying "public / private servers" in the context of Freenet is wrong because Freenet is not organized into "servers". Basically the whole of Freenet is connected into one big public network.

And it addresses files, not machines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588336

"Private" happens in terms of a file being "private" if you don't share the link to it with anyone.

(A separate Freenet network which is fully private would be possible if every participant configures his instance to not connect to the outside. But one participant disobeying that and it is not private anymore, so it's unlikely that such networks exist.)

https://github.com/freenet/website/pull/98

I would blindguess that this was caused by Travis CI shutting down its free service for open source, the website was deployed using Travis IIRC.

That's where the paradox has to be coming from. When they say "end censorship" they mean "prevent filtering that we don't want to happen" (like whistleblowing). But at the same time they absolutely totally want NOT to prevent filtering they want to happen (like drugs, child porn, terrorism, etc). It's only censorship if they don't want it, if they want it that's not censorship that's a different word.

It's like saying it's a candy if it's intended to be eaten, but a toy if it's intended to be had, and then expecting to eat the candy and have the toy.

It's a good thing that the legacy tech scene that the loud, high-karma moral busybodies on this site represent is becoming hated, bypassed, and ultimately irrelevant.

https://nymtech.net/

I have been contributing for ~ 12 years and now have acquired long-term funding (independent of Freenet's own funding!) to continue my contributions in a more intense fashion.

The core network which serves static HTML sites + audio/video is stable and usable. It has a bunch of reliable long-term contributors working on it.

Hence development on my personal side is focused on polishing existing dynamic applications which are built on top of Freenet, and implementing some new ones.

Basic implementations of notably forums, social networking, blogging and mail exist already, the goal is to make them easy to use (integrate them into the main UI instead of being standalone), add much more features, improve performance and security.

Here's a list of these and dozens of other apps built on Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects

Developing dynamic stuff is taking so long because it is a complex endeavor:

On the regular Internet, censorship happens by "look up who owns the IP, go to their address, remove the computer."

Since this is not possible on Freenet as everyone is anonymous, censorship will happen by denial of service: For example forum systems would be spammed to death to get rid of unwanted content.

Thus the architecture of censorship-resistant systems has to be reinvented from scratch, you can't just take a regular forum system and stick Freenet on top of it.

It has to be decentralized to be resistant against DoS - there must not be Tor-alike central servers ("hidden sites" / .onion sites). Instead messages are stored across the whole network and replicated automatically if they are downloaded more often and thus need more bandwidth (the added redundance also makes them more censorship-resistant).

And spam filtering need to be a first-class application, I have worked for years only on that.

So the different architecture is the primary pitfall which many projects which decided "Freenet is too old, we're gonna build this from scratch with nice Javascript etc." fell into IMHO: First it's "we'll develop a regular app, we can bolt Tor onto it later", then they realize that the threat-model is so different that this is just not possible and the projects never become anonymous/censorship-resistant.

So privacy needs to be built in from the start.

Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first anti-censorship + privacy network!), and I don't mind that it's taking decades to develop because of the extended threat model:

That's still better than being one of wheel-reinventing post-Freenet projects which then abandon the privacy idea in the end anyway, or postpone it forever.

Tor won over most of the anti-censorship users of Freenet by adding hidden services. The model of servers and clients seemed to be easier to model around than a shared data store, for reason that might have to do with how websites on internet has moved on from the 90's and early 2000s.

I am unsure if the concept of a anonymized and censorship resistant shared data store has a place in the future. If copyright enforcement actually become effective in stopping torrenting, then maybe Freenet will see a renewal (possible as a patch to the torrent protocol). Hopefully without java.

I really don't like this wording. How are you so sure that they NEED real anonymous systems? I understand the value of privacy, but I don't think I get to dictate what other people NEED.

I then went to the IRC, reddit and wiki and ether got nothing back or nothing useful. Eventually gave up.

Vs something like IPFS where you just run the software and localhost becomes your portal to the network and you can even access files as a basic file path via the FUSE mount.

Edit: Clarifying that I was using an unofficial build for freenet which may have made it harder.

And confidential Friend-to-Friend Chat over Freenet as Android App.

Last year saw Freenet ported to Android.

There are a lot of changes still in the pipeline to be released this year.

(... for some definition of "many".)

For me that’s a compelling use-case.

Meet us on libera.chat: https://web.libera.chat/?nick=FollowTheRabbit|?#freenet

The fact is a lot of, if not most people think people who trade in CSAM should be tracked down, terrorist and criminal communications should be monitored and don't have a problem with government agencies spying on foreigners. They don't have a problem with them spying on domestic communications too in pursuit of the aforesaid goals.

Yes a slim majority say state monitoring is too invasive, but that doesn't mean they want it to stop.

I do appreciate that the earnest libertarians behind Freenet try hard to expunge CSAM and such, but the only reason they are able to do that is because Freenet is dominated be earnest libertarians. As soon as a more representative demographic got on to it, that would go right out of the window.

If nobody is interested to download your files, which they wouldn't be because they are undecryptable blobs, then very soon you will be the only one storing those files, and you have gained nothing from making them available on freenet, but you have wasted your own bandwidth by uploading them.

Also it would be horribly slow as far as storage goes compared to a hard drive.

[1] https://github.com/maidsafe

I’m thinking about leaving the US and getting a EU work visa to avoid the shitshow. There are a lot of people who think censorship is good - in the name of fighting misinformation - and generally hold a negative opinion of opposing viewpoints.