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Why are distributed filesystems like IPFS so popular again these days ? Freenet has been around (and super niche) for close to 20 years soon. Is it because the

Why are distributed filesystems like IPFS so popular again these days ? Freenet has been around (and super niche) for close to 20 years soon. Is it because the Bitcoin hype has reinvigorated crypto-anarchists?

adrianN 9y ago
I'd run a freenet node if it wouldn't expose me to the risk of getting all my gear confiscated by some LEA.
- krick 9y ago
  Probably I don't know something: why should it?
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Because Freenet is used for distributing CP.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Freenet's model places random content on every node. Sure, it may be encrypted, but if there's a sting and your IP distributes something bad during that sting, you will be investigated and possibly arrested/falsely accused. It's the same dilemma that Tor exit node operators face. You are essentially loaning your IP out to the masses. Since this is what law enforcement uses to associate internet activity with individuals, there's a high risk that someone will eventually end up "borrowing" your IP to send something illegal.
htns 9y ago
I've been wondering that too. There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it". If anything it weakens privacy a little, since any mean-spirited gremlin gets to snoop on who visits and hosts what.
- feanaro 9y ago
  > There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it". This is a very business/customer-centric perspective. What about resistance to censorship, ease of sharing without relying on central third-parties, resistance to linkrot of non-commercial content or even content from a business that went under, etc?
  - htns 9y ago
    Censorship resistance is illusory without any anonymity. It'd make me a little sad if anyone gets into IPFS because of its censorship resistance when freenet and tor hidden services already exist. The central third party is preferable to potentially anyone being able to start logging who is viewing a given piece of content.
    - feanaro 9y ago
      I agree that anonimity is an important aspect of censorship resistance, in particular the avoidance of being easily targetted. However, avoiding single point of failures is just as important, and this is what IPFS (currently) solves. Eventually, Tor and/or i2p integration is likely to happen. I don't think Freenet and IPFS mutually exclude each other, though. Freenet is a specialized tool with low usability. IPFS aims to be a core, widespread infrastructural protocol with high usability. In this way, I think they can co-exist and be complementary. The existence of a harder to use and more anonymous tool doesn't negate the usefulness of having a more widely used tool with lesser guarantees.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Well, one allure for me is the fact that the topology of Internet is getting ridiculous. Bits between devices nearby travel halfway across the globe for no reason but centralized control over the data. When I watch a cool YouTube video and want to send it to my friend, who happens to be in the same network, he shouldn't need to download it all the way from Australia again - it should just travel over the LAN.
akvadrako 9y ago
Because it's more practical. Freenet was just too slow 10 years ago. Maybe it's better now, but it could never achieve IPFS speeds.
jancsika 9y ago
From the article: > IPFS doesn’t require every node to store all of the content that has ever been published to IPFS. Instead, you choose what data you want to help persist. Freenet has a different set of design goals and tradeoffs. IPFS is much close to Bittorrent which AFAICT has never really waned in popularity.
tmerr 9y ago
Hmm they are sort of different things. Freenet basically has hash-addressed content plus some relationship between human-readable strings and the hashes, so you/can/refer/to/stuff/like/this making it easy to use HTTP on top of Freenet for navigation. In contrast IPFS makes the hashed content itself in charge of navigation by using git-like objects -- if you understand the way git objects work https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects then you understand that this allows you to navigate an immutable tree of content and an immutable history. In contrast, on Freenet particular files are immutable, but that's as much as they guarantee. They also differ in the way routing works. On Freenet you ask a (mostly) random neighbor whether they have a file with the hash you want. If they don't have it, they ask another (mostly) random neighbor. This can go on for a while, until it either finds the content or hits a maximum number of hops, in which case it backtracks. The only point of these rube-goldberg shenanigans is anonymity. Since IPFS is more concerned about performance it flips this on its head: instead of blindly asking nodes for content, it carefully keeps track of peers who advertise what they're looking for; aside from being much more efficient, this also allows you to choose not to do business with leechers, like in bittorrent. Maybe IPFS is a reinvention of a past technology, but certainly not Freenet. (Does anyone know of something closer?) Freenet paper: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs414/2003sp/papers/freenet.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs414/2003sp/papers/freene... IPFS paper: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs...
- Asdfbla 9y ago
  Very interesting, thanks for the answer. I'll read the papers you linked.
- clarry 9y ago
  > Freenet basically has hash-addressed content plus some relationship between human-readable strings and the hashes, so you/can/refer/to/stuff/like/this making it easy to use HTTP on top of Freenet for navigation. In contrast IPFS makes the hashed content itself in charge of navigation by using git-like objects [..] on Freenet particular files are immutable, but that's as much as they guarantee. Actually there isn't that much of a difference here. Freenet manifests are analogous to git trees; knowing the chk of a manifest file gets you to the metadata that identifies all the files under the tree. It's all immutable. There are some noteworthy differences though. One that stands out in particular is that freenode breaks large (>32kB) files into chunks. Everything is encrypted too. So finding a file you want is not quite as simple as taking the hash of the plain, unencrypted file. Either way, you can easily build a git-like hierarchy of immutable content (and history) on Freenet, and this is more or less what happens under the hood anyway with manifests and splitfiles. As a slight deviation from the norm, Freenet also can also address (signed) content by its public key rather than content hash. This is one way to enable mutable data; not entirely unlike heads. They can still link to immutable content hash keys. > They also differ in the way routing works. On Freenet you ask a (mostly) random neighbor whether they have a file with the hash you want. If they don't have it, they ask another (mostly) random neighbor. This can go on for a while, until it either finds the content or hits a maximum number of hops, in which case it backtracks. The only point of these rube-goldberg shenanigans is anonymity. It's worth pointing out that Freenet does have a simple but powerful routing system. Each network node has a virtual location, in key space. Requests are routed towards the nodes that are most close to the requested key. With careful selection of peers, the network topology can make for very efficient routing. E.g. one could have a small number of nodes "far apart" in key space, to faciliate routing towards far-away keys. Then you have a larger number of relatively close nodes, so that when a request comes in "your general direction" from a far-away node, you're likely to have the right peer to route to. It is true that some randomisation helps with anonymity. EDIT: I'll add that the flipside of a network that essentially enables leeching is that it's also good for retention of popular (or "popular") items. Requested data is cached en route, so it's sort of automatic load balancing. Soon enough popular resources are likely to be held by whoever is nearby. People won't need to manually pin the content, and it's hard to directly DoS those who share the content you're "after." Asking for it just makes it more available. I think this is important to consider if we're discussing reliability of distributed networks. I'm not saying what the implications are -- for they can be good or bad.
tbv 9y ago
A bit of that, a bit of new people realizing the potential and giving it their best shot. I've spoken to a lot of people who say that Freenet was fun, but just too damn slow to be usable.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Freenet and friends are certainly slow, or at least were when I tried them many years ago. It was never really fit for general adoption. IPFS differs in that it's trying to do this "at scale" in a way that may potentially be mass-adoptable.
0x445442 9y ago
For a couple of reasons: - Because these centralized walled gardens were DOA; people just didn't realized it yet. Personally, I never saw any of the currently popular social network platforms as offering anything significant over the AOL of yesteryear. - Now that its been shown Facebook and Google actively monitor and restrict content that doesn't align with their narratives, folks are becoming wary of centralization.

adrianN 9y ago

I'd run a freenet node if it wouldn't expose me to the risk of getting all my gear confiscated by some LEA.

krick 9y ago
Probably I don't know something: why should it?
- adrianN 9y ago
  Because Freenet is used for distributing CP.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Freenet's model places random content on every node. Sure, it may be encrypted, but if there's a sting and your IP distributes something bad during that sting, you will be investigated and possibly arrested/falsely accused. It's the same dilemma that Tor exit node operators face. You are essentially loaning your IP out to the masses. Since this is what law enforcement uses to associate internet activity with individuals, there's a high risk that someone will eventually end up "borrowing" your IP to send something illegal.

htns 9y ago

I've been wondering that too. There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it". If anything it weakens privacy a little, since any mean-spirited gremlin gets to snoop on who visits and hosts what.

feanaro 9y ago
> There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it". This is a very business/customer-centric perspective. What about resistance to censorship, ease of sharing without relying on central third-parties, resistance to linkrot of non-commercial content or even content from a business that went under, etc?
- htns 9y ago
  Censorship resistance is illusory without any anonymity. It'd make me a little sad if anyone gets into IPFS because of its censorship resistance when freenet and tor hidden services already exist. The central third party is preferable to potentially anyone being able to start logging who is viewing a given piece of content.
  - feanaro 9y ago
    I agree that anonimity is an important aspect of censorship resistance, in particular the avoidance of being easily targetted. However, avoiding single point of failures is just as important, and this is what IPFS (currently) solves. Eventually, Tor and/or i2p integration is likely to happen. I don't think Freenet and IPFS mutually exclude each other, though. Freenet is a specialized tool with low usability. IPFS aims to be a core, widespread infrastructural protocol with high usability. In this way, I think they can co-exist and be complementary. The existence of a harder to use and more anonymous tool doesn't negate the usefulness of having a more widely used tool with lesser guarantees.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Well, one allure for me is the fact that the topology of Internet is getting ridiculous. Bits between devices nearby travel halfway across the globe for no reason but centralized control over the data. When I watch a cool YouTube video and want to send it to my friend, who happens to be in the same network, he shouldn't need to download it all the way from Australia again - it should just travel over the LAN.

akvadrako 9y ago

Because it's more practical. Freenet was just too slow 10 years ago. Maybe it's better now, but it could never achieve IPFS speeds.

jancsika 9y ago

From the article: > IPFS doesn’t require every node to store all of the content that has ever been published to IPFS. Instead, you choose what data you want to help persist. Freenet has a different set of design goals and tradeoffs. IPFS is much close to Bittorrent which AFAICT has never really waned in popularity.

tmerr 9y ago

Hmm they are sort of different things. Freenet basically has hash-addressed content plus some relationship between human-readable strings and the hashes, so you/can/refer/to/stuff/like/this making it easy to use HTTP on top of Freenet for navigation. In contrast IPFS makes the hashed content itself in charge of navigation by using git-like objects -- if you understand the way git objects work https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects then you understand that this allows you to navigate an immutable tree of content and an immutable history. In contrast, on Freenet particular files are immutable, but that's as much as they guarantee. They also differ in the way routing works. On Freenet you ask a (mostly) random neighbor whether they have a file with the hash you want. If they don't have it, they ask another (mostly) random neighbor. This can go on for a while, until it either finds the content or hits a maximum number of hops, in which case it backtracks. The only point of these rube-goldberg shenanigans is anonymity. Since IPFS is more concerned about performance it flips this on its head: instead of blindly asking nodes for content, it carefully keeps track of peers who advertise what they're looking for; aside from being much more efficient, this also allows you to choose not to do business with leechers, like in bittorrent. Maybe IPFS is a reinvention of a past technology, but certainly not Freenet. (Does anyone know of something closer?) Freenet paper: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs414/2003sp/papers/freenet.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs414/2003sp/papers/freene... IPFS paper: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs...

Asdfbla 9y ago
Very interesting, thanks for the answer. I'll read the papers you linked.
clarry 9y ago
> Freenet basically has hash-addressed content plus some relationship between human-readable strings and the hashes, so you/can/refer/to/stuff/like/this making it easy to use HTTP on top of Freenet for navigation. In contrast IPFS makes the hashed content itself in charge of navigation by using git-like objects [..] on Freenet particular files are immutable, but that's as much as they guarantee. Actually there isn't that much of a difference here. Freenet manifests are analogous to git trees; knowing the chk of a manifest file gets you to the metadata that identifies all the files under the tree. It's all immutable. There are some noteworthy differences though. One that stands out in particular is that freenode breaks large (>32kB) files into chunks. Everything is encrypted too. So finding a file you want is not quite as simple as taking the hash of the plain, unencrypted file. Either way, you can easily build a git-like hierarchy of immutable content (and history) on Freenet, and this is more or less what happens under the hood anyway with manifests and splitfiles. As a slight deviation from the norm, Freenet also can also address (signed) content by its public key rather than content hash. This is one way to enable mutable data; not entirely unlike heads. They can still link to immutable content hash keys. > They also differ in the way routing works. On Freenet you ask a (mostly) random neighbor whether they have a file with the hash you want. If they don't have it, they ask another (mostly) random neighbor. This can go on for a while, until it either finds the content or hits a maximum number of hops, in which case it backtracks. The only point of these rube-goldberg shenanigans is anonymity. It's worth pointing out that Freenet does have a simple but powerful routing system. Each network node has a virtual location, in key space. Requests are routed towards the nodes that are most close to the requested key. With careful selection of peers, the network topology can make for very efficient routing. E.g. one could have a small number of nodes "far apart" in key space, to faciliate routing towards far-away keys. Then you have a larger number of relatively close nodes, so that when a request comes in "your general direction" from a far-away node, you're likely to have the right peer to route to. It is true that some randomisation helps with anonymity. EDIT: I'll add that the flipside of a network that essentially enables leeching is that it's also good for retention of popular (or "popular") items. Requested data is cached en route, so it's sort of automatic load balancing. Soon enough popular resources are likely to be held by whoever is nearby. People won't need to manually pin the content, and it's hard to directly DoS those who share the content you're "after." Asking for it just makes it more available. I think this is important to consider if we're discussing reliability of distributed networks. I'm not saying what the implications are -- for they can be good or bad.

tbv 9y ago

A bit of that, a bit of new people realizing the potential and giving it their best shot. I've spoken to a lot of people who say that Freenet was fun, but just too damn slow to be usable.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Freenet and friends are certainly slow, or at least were when I tried them many years ago. It was never really fit for general adoption. IPFS differs in that it's trying to do this "at scale" in a way that may potentially be mass-adoptable.

0x445442 9y ago

For a couple of reasons: - Because these centralized walled gardens were DOA; people just didn't realized it yet. Personally, I never saw any of the currently popular social network platforms as offering anything significant over the AOL of yesteryear. - Now that its been shown Facebook and Google actively monitor and restrict content that doesn't align with their narratives, folks are becoming wary of centralization.