Basically anything you've thought of the NSA or other intelligence agencies intercepting, it was wide out in the open there. The types of things you'd see kids telling themselves about urban legends of the "darkweb", well, it was extremely real and in the open on Freenet...
Sarcasm aside, that experience sounds similar to what I've seen when trying out freenet way back.
On the other hand my I2P experience was quite pleasant (by just following the planet.i2p stream, basically an announcement site for new "registered" domains and torrents), with easy discovery of downloadable leaks, anarchist and conspiracy theorist blogs. Really felt like my 90s internet experience where I could find new and edgy content everywhere.
Maybe you should try again. It is quite a different experience nowadays (if you just use what you see and don’t go digging for stuff to get angry about — if you do the latter, you’ll also find "the internet" to be a place full of disgusting evil).
Maybe I'll give it a go next time when I muck around with anonymous P2P setups and protocols, until I get frustrated with the UX/DX, as always, and give up.
By the way, I really hate meaningless spooky terms like “dark web” and “dark net”. I can still remember the time before journalists invented them.
Given the other responses, I wasn't the only one who was aware of the content on Freenet 20 years ago.
And the quotes around "darkweb" were largely to abstract it as a concept of urban legend itself, so I guess we can agree on that.
> In the years since 9/11, police raids of terrorist cells in the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain have yielded countless images of hard-core child pornography.
https://nypost.com/2015/02/17/why-are-jihadis-so-obsessed-wi...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/191554-nsa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2qtGisT34
I'm done with this thread. You guys are way too literal. If I cared I would find better sources, but two simple Google searches is enough for me. I have dishes to wash which is much more productive than these threads have become.
Perhaps my memory fails me, and you have some links to fix my error? Please share. Before you say you can't remember the specifics, let me tell you that most freesites are still available (at least the pages in their root archives), and that Frost and FMS has archives of most public discussion that happened there, so it would not be hard to check whether something like this happened or not.
Anyone who took this trolling at face value should really reconsider trusting everything they read on the internet.
I never said that a central slave market was on Freenet. I don't even think the protocol would be a very effective way to do it due to how slow and unreliable the protocol is at retrieving things. What I meant was that images of this stuff were available in large galleries, and the previous messaging system before Frost would auto-find new forums for you at random. Frequently they would be large galleries of images of this stuff.
So have fun with whatever you are expecting me to pull out of 20 years ago links that are like however many 40+ hex digits long. I haven't used Freenet since I saw that stuff. Not really sure why you'd think I would keep links to it or I would have a photographic memory or even would actively seek out the stuff.
I'm not sitting here saying I contributed, I'm saying I would play around with Freenet, even submit some harmless static HTML pages for fun to test the protocol. After the messaging system started popping up forums that I didn't find acceptable, I deleted the client and never touched Freenet again.
The burden of proof is not on me nor you. This is a conversation on the internet not a spontaneous scientific journal nor an inquisition.
Also, if we talk literally 20 years ago, Freenet was at infancy, still used arbitrary human-readable content keys that were supposed to be shared externally —
https://web.archive.org/web/20000817234626/http://unicast.or...
— and web pages were only a proposed option (with Javascript!):
https://web.archive.org/web/20010405191438/http://freenetpro...
You are probably thinking of more mature days of Freenet version 0.5, which, in its turn, was a network independent from Freenet version 0.7 (2008—present). I've seen 0.5 when it still ran in parallel, and can't remember the content being way too different in general. Still no child slaves for sale.
The days where many people posted stuff just for the thrill of being able to post something illegal and disgusting are long gone — partly because the communication structures in Freenet evolved, so such stuff will quickly make you invisible to most people (since most people subscribe to moderation that hides that).
BRRR!
edit: though bulk delivery by railroad car may be technically correct, just add some heat, or let the car stand for a while.
One does not need to imagine the 'epic whiffs' coming from that, because it happens IRL!
[0] https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/poop-train-full-of-nyc-sew...