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I've always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I'd check it out were that discoverability was h

I've always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I'd check it out were that discoverability was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content it was usually stuff I wouldn't want to find to begin with. That's left a lot of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for only illegal things on it.

nerdponx 8y ago
I had a similar experience with various other peer-to-peer networks: I2P (except the I2P torrent scene is pretty good), Zeronet, GNUnet. Tor stands out as the only one to have caught on.
notacoward 8y ago
Similar impressions here. Freenet was an impressive vehicle for exploring some very important topics and ideas. Unfortunately, besides the problems you mention, the community around it was ... unpleasant. On a good day they could seem a bit overzealous. On a bad day they were downright crazy, and they were always hostile to any advice or criticism from others even in their own field. For example, Freenet isn't a permanent data store. It's more like a cache; if something isn't requested long enough it just ages out. That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. Not sad that Freenet and its promoters have faded into obscurity.
- renegadus 8y ago
  > That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. The system did not and could not store information permanently, if it did it would fill up, which is a non-starter when it depends on people volunteering their hard disk space. I don't know about going ballistic, but since this issue is addressed directly in their papers (section 3.4 of the linked paper) I can see us getting irritated by people re-asking questions that have already been answered.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    I would think you should have long ago learned the lesson that if you don't have a FAQ page somewhere with huge titles and colorful answers, people will never read a paper. Hell, most people don't read FAQs either.
    - renegadus 8y ago
      In future we'll use <blink> tags ;)
    - notacoward 8y ago
      Despite the fact that it was mentioned in the paper, developers continued to deny that it was a serious problem or claim that it had been solved since. Periodic re-insertion and date-based redirects were both touted as answers. As for "can't" that's not accurate. You can certainly prevent old data from being pushed out, by returning an error on insertion of new data if there's no free space. That's how many other storage systems (e.g. every filesystem ever) work. While it's true that you can't fully protect against a reduction of capacity when nodes go offline, that's a very different issue. Freenet being cache-like rather than storage-like was a decision of convenience, not a technical necessity.
      - renegadus 8y ago
        Filesystems don't rely on space voluntarily donated by others, and that's the critical difference here. Freenet is designed for sharing information, not archiving it. You can't have both.
        notacoward 8y ago
        Other systems have also relied on space voluntarily donated by others, and still made the choice to behave as storage systems instead of messaging systems with some history. Or caches that just happen to turn over slowly because the system's too slow and unusable to create cache pressure. If Freenet ever had really taken off, you would have had to deal with these issues. Sharing information doesn't work when the information falls out before the recipient can get it.
- ArneBab 8y ago
  "it’s like a cache" is what we’ve been saying as the default description for years. When did you last interact with the freenet community?
  - notacoward 8y ago
    > When did you last interact with the freenet community? When it was still relevant, i.e. a long time ago.
    - ArneBab 8y ago
      then you missed quite many changes
JoshTriplett 8y ago
That's rather inherent: if you create a network whose primary feature is anonymity and lack of rules, your early adopters will be everyone barred by the rules of other services, which means you become a cesspool. Tor did a good job with marketing and optics early on, to make its intended use cases highly visible.
- infinity0 8y ago
  > That's rather inherent: if you create a network whose primary feature is anonymity and lack of rules, your early adopters will be everyone barred by the rules of other services, which means you become a cesspool. > Tor did a good job with marketing and optics early on, to make its intended use cases highly visible. I used to work on Freenet. The mechanic you're pointing out doesn't have to be the dominant effect if the system performs as well as the alternatives. If everything else is equal (speed and convenience), users would of course prefer to have more security than less. If the performance and usability is only slightly worse, users may still be willing to choose security over that (e.g. Tor) - people today are becoming more aware of just how much their data can get abused. Unfortunately for Freenet the technology wasn't capable enough - the security wasn't worth the usability and performance tradeoffs for most users. That doesn't mean strong security inherently attracts unpleasant types.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  VOAT turning into a cesspool of everything that was being banned from Reddit is another example of that, too.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    “The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.”
    - zrm 8y ago
      The solution to that may be to separate the hosting from the discovery. If the hosting is anonymous and censorship-resistant then you'll get every type of content, but for anybody to use it they would first have to find it. Then you have a slew of independent discoverability portals. Some are created for child pornography, so the FBI hacks into them and then uses them to arrest everybody there. Others are created to replace Tumblr and YouTube and refuse to link to child pornography, so child pornographers have no reason to go there and the people disgusted by child pornography can safely use them. But setting up a discoverability portal is a lot less expensive than setting up a hosting service (because a link uses much less bandwidth than high quality video), so there should be more competition, and in particular it should still be difficult to censor anything that has more than a modest amount of popular support.
yason 8y ago
It's no wonder really. If you build a system that allows anonymity and untraceability you will end up hosting everything that can't normally happen without anonymity and untraceability. Hackers marvel at the idea of complete anonymity and untraceability because it's technically exciting and fits so well with the hacker thinking. I mean, why should you have to reveal who you are because of mere accountability? Everyone knows hackers don't cause harm and when they do it's only a good deed because the system they "broke" was obviously broken already. But the same technology is a much more prominent tool for criminals, molesters, and such. So that's what you will get on the anonymous networks and not so much hackers with good intentions.
- 6nf 8y ago
  ‘Information wants to be free’
  - notacoward 8y ago
    Interestingly, many of that principle's strongest proponents are selective in its application. While they're adamant that information in the sense of content should be free, they're equally adamant that information in the sense of identity should be strictly limited and controlled by its owners. Unfortunately, as soon as you remove identity you also remove accountability, and while there are edge cases (e.g. political dissent) where that's a good thing, most of the time it's not. Personally, I think anonymity sucks. I'm all for pseudonyms, which have some continuity and reputation and thus some accountability. Modern cryptography provides ways to prevent impersonation, and even to claim a pseudonym if the owner desires, but when you consider methods such as traffic analysis it's not trivial. These are problems Freenet tried to address, but then they took a bit of a wrong turn toward complete anonymity. That, and the bad taste left in people's mouths by positioning a message system with some accidental persistence as a true data store, is why other systems eclipsed it.
    - ArneBab 8y ago
      Pseudonymity is what you get when you allow people to tightly control their own information. This is what Freenet uses: You have a private key to which you can upload and which you can use as pseudonym in messaging systems.
mirimir 8y ago
Yes, the public Freenet opennet contains lots of horrible content. But then, Freenet's focus has always been censorship resistance. Content gets distributed and replicated according to its popularity. It's a lot like BitTorrent, but with serious transport encryption and randomized routing. And arguably it's worked pretty well for that, given that there's been consistently lots of horrible content for 18 years. Content providers (and users) have been busted, but that hasn't eliminated much of their content. However, being a pure P2P system, you only have "anonymity" through plausible deniability. And that's a dangerous game to play. Criminal investigators have used modified Freenet nodes to track chunks of illegal content, and have prosecuted users whose nodes processed those chunks. The Freenet Project argues that it's impossible to reliably determine whether nodes are requesting those chunks, or merely relaying requests from other nodes. But if you end up in court, you'll need an expert witness to convince the jury of that. So you'll likely end up with a plea bargain. So anyway, it's safest to run Freenet on anonymously leased VPS, and access its webGUI as a Tor .onion service. Just as you'd prudently run a BitTorrent seedbox.
- athrun 8y ago
  Is it even possible to anonymously lease a VPS? I guess you would need to use cash, at a minimum.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Sure. Do everything via Tor, using Whonix to avoid leaks. Hit Tor through nested VPN chains. Buy some Bitcoin, and then mix two or three times. Use a different Whonix instance for each mixing step, and a different mixing service. Then lease your VPS. And if it really matters, you can daisy chain VPS via Tor .onion SSH.[0] 0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-login-chaining https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-logi...
    - tbrownaw 8y ago
      [...] Then lease your VPS ... With a credit card (which of course has your name on it), since AFAIK the providers tend to only accept bitcoin for established accounts.
pnathan 8y ago
That was my impression when I ran Freenet years ago. A few cool materials, a horrifying amount of pedophilia and other really skeezy stuff.
bitwize 8y ago
And this is why censorship is the future of the internet. If you run an online service and don't censor, you become a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Exhibit A: USENET. Exhibit B: Freenet.
- mirimir 8y ago
  There's a place for both highly moderated and free for all spaces. I prefer moderated discussion forums, because discussions work better without jerks. But I also value free for all spaces, because they guarantee that messages can't be silenced, no matter how unpopular and illegal they are.
- ArneBab 8y ago
  When did you last look at Freenet? When did you last check the moderated discussion boards? (FMS) There’s a lot of original non-scum user content on Freenet nowadays.
cantthinkofone 8y ago
I'd like to see what can be done with anonymity but with more filters. When this software was first designed, AI-driven content classification was virtually nonexistent. If bots can be designed to be moderators, I'm thinking if you were to fuse that functionality to an anonymous data storage, you would be able to ensure only productive content enters storage, and content that is irrelevant can be excluded. Of course that bot would need to know precisely what it should exclude from storage which seems hard to define.

nerdponx 8y ago

I had a similar experience with various other peer-to-peer networks: I2P (except the I2P torrent scene is pretty good), Zeronet, GNUnet. Tor stands out as the only one to have caught on.

notacoward 8y ago

Similar impressions here. Freenet was an impressive vehicle for exploring some very important topics and ideas. Unfortunately, besides the problems you mention, the community around it was ... unpleasant. On a good day they could seem a bit overzealous. On a bad day they were downright crazy, and they were always hostile to any advice or criticism from others even in their own field. For example, Freenet isn't a permanent data store. It's more like a cache; if something isn't requested long enough it just ages out. That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. Not sad that Freenet and its promoters have faded into obscurity.

renegadus 8y ago
> That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic. The system did not and could not store information permanently, if it did it would fill up, which is a non-starter when it depends on people volunteering their hard disk space. I don't know about going ballistic, but since this issue is addressed directly in their papers (section 3.4 of the linked paper) I can see us getting irritated by people re-asking questions that have already been answered.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  I would think you should have long ago learned the lesson that if you don't have a FAQ page somewhere with huge titles and colorful answers, people will never read a paper. Hell, most people don't read FAQs either.
  - renegadus 8y ago
    In future we'll use <blink> tags ;)
  - notacoward 8y ago
    Despite the fact that it was mentioned in the paper, developers continued to deny that it was a serious problem or claim that it had been solved since. Periodic re-insertion and date-based redirects were both touted as answers. As for "can't" that's not accurate. You can certainly prevent old data from being pushed out, by returning an error on insertion of new data if there's no free space. That's how many other storage systems (e.g. every filesystem ever) work. While it's true that you can't fully protect against a reduction of capacity when nodes go offline, that's a very different issue. Freenet being cache-like rather than storage-like was a decision of convenience, not a technical necessity.
    - renegadus 8y ago
      Filesystems don't rely on space voluntarily donated by others, and that's the critical difference here. Freenet is designed for sharing information, not archiving it. You can't have both.
      - notacoward 8y ago
        Other systems have also relied on space voluntarily donated by others, and still made the choice to behave as storage systems instead of messaging systems with some history. Or caches that just happen to turn over slowly because the system's too slow and unusable to create cache pressure. If Freenet ever had really taken off, you would have had to deal with these issues. Sharing information doesn't work when the information falls out before the recipient can get it.
ArneBab 8y ago
"it’s like a cache" is what we’ve been saying as the default description for years. When did you last interact with the freenet community?
- notacoward 8y ago
  > When did you last interact with the freenet community? When it was still relevant, i.e. a long time ago.
  - ArneBab 8y ago
    then you missed quite many changes

JoshTriplett 8y ago

That's rather inherent: if you create a network whose primary feature is anonymity and lack of rules, your early adopters will be everyone barred by the rules of other services, which means you become a cesspool. Tor did a good job with marketing and optics early on, to make its intended use cases highly visible.

infinity0 8y ago
> That's rather inherent: if you create a network whose primary feature is anonymity and lack of rules, your early adopters will be everyone barred by the rules of other services, which means you become a cesspool. > Tor did a good job with marketing and optics early on, to make its intended use cases highly visible. I used to work on Freenet. The mechanic you're pointing out doesn't have to be the dominant effect if the system performs as well as the alternatives. If everything else is equal (speed and convenience), users would of course prefer to have more security than less. If the performance and usability is only slightly worse, users may still be willing to choose security over that (e.g. Tor) - people today are becoming more aware of just how much their data can get abused. Unfortunately for Freenet the technology wasn't capable enough - the security wasn't worth the usability and performance tradeoffs for most users. That doesn't mean strong security inherently attracts unpleasant types.
FooHentai 8y ago
VOAT turning into a cesspool of everything that was being banned from Reddit is another example of that, too.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  “The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.”
  - zrm 8y ago
    The solution to that may be to separate the hosting from the discovery. If the hosting is anonymous and censorship-resistant then you'll get every type of content, but for anybody to use it they would first have to find it. Then you have a slew of independent discoverability portals. Some are created for child pornography, so the FBI hacks into them and then uses them to arrest everybody there. Others are created to replace Tumblr and YouTube and refuse to link to child pornography, so child pornographers have no reason to go there and the people disgusted by child pornography can safely use them. But setting up a discoverability portal is a lot less expensive than setting up a hosting service (because a link uses much less bandwidth than high quality video), so there should be more competition, and in particular it should still be difficult to censor anything that has more than a modest amount of popular support.

yason 8y ago

It's no wonder really. If you build a system that allows anonymity and untraceability you will end up hosting everything that can't normally happen without anonymity and untraceability. Hackers marvel at the idea of complete anonymity and untraceability because it's technically exciting and fits so well with the hacker thinking. I mean, why should you have to reveal who you are because of mere accountability? Everyone knows hackers don't cause harm and when they do it's only a good deed because the system they "broke" was obviously broken already. But the same technology is a much more prominent tool for criminals, molesters, and such. So that's what you will get on the anonymous networks and not so much hackers with good intentions.

6nf 8y ago
‘Information wants to be free’
- notacoward 8y ago
  Interestingly, many of that principle's strongest proponents are selective in its application. While they're adamant that information in the sense of content should be free, they're equally adamant that information in the sense of identity should be strictly limited and controlled by its owners. Unfortunately, as soon as you remove identity you also remove accountability, and while there are edge cases (e.g. political dissent) where that's a good thing, most of the time it's not. Personally, I think anonymity sucks. I'm all for pseudonyms, which have some continuity and reputation and thus some accountability. Modern cryptography provides ways to prevent impersonation, and even to claim a pseudonym if the owner desires, but when you consider methods such as traffic analysis it's not trivial. These are problems Freenet tried to address, but then they took a bit of a wrong turn toward complete anonymity. That, and the bad taste left in people's mouths by positioning a message system with some accidental persistence as a true data store, is why other systems eclipsed it.
  - ArneBab 8y ago
    Pseudonymity is what you get when you allow people to tightly control their own information. This is what Freenet uses: You have a private key to which you can upload and which you can use as pseudonym in messaging systems.

mirimir 8y ago

Yes, the public Freenet opennet contains lots of horrible content. But then, Freenet's focus has always been censorship resistance. Content gets distributed and replicated according to its popularity. It's a lot like BitTorrent, but with serious transport encryption and randomized routing. And arguably it's worked pretty well for that, given that there's been consistently lots of horrible content for 18 years. Content providers (and users) have been busted, but that hasn't eliminated much of their content. However, being a pure P2P system, you only have "anonymity" through plausible deniability. And that's a dangerous game to play. Criminal investigators have used modified Freenet nodes to track chunks of illegal content, and have prosecuted users whose nodes processed those chunks. The Freenet Project argues that it's impossible to reliably determine whether nodes are requesting those chunks, or merely relaying requests from other nodes. But if you end up in court, you'll need an expert witness to convince the jury of that. So you'll likely end up with a plea bargain. So anyway, it's safest to run Freenet on anonymously leased VPS, and access its webGUI as a Tor .onion service. Just as you'd prudently run a BitTorrent seedbox.

athrun 8y ago
Is it even possible to anonymously lease a VPS? I guess you would need to use cash, at a minimum.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Sure. Do everything via Tor, using Whonix to avoid leaks. Hit Tor through nested VPN chains. Buy some Bitcoin, and then mix two or three times. Use a different Whonix instance for each mixing step, and a different mixing service. Then lease your VPS. And if it really matters, you can daisy chain VPS via Tor .onion SSH.[0] 0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-login-chaining https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-logi...
  - tbrownaw 8y ago
    [...] Then lease your VPS ... With a credit card (which of course has your name on it), since AFAIK the providers tend to only accept bitcoin for established accounts.

pnathan 8y ago

That was my impression when I ran Freenet years ago. A few cool materials, a horrifying amount of pedophilia and other really skeezy stuff.

bitwize 8y ago

And this is why censorship is the future of the internet. If you run an online service and don't censor, you become a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Exhibit A: USENET. Exhibit B: Freenet.

mirimir 8y ago
There's a place for both highly moderated and free for all spaces. I prefer moderated discussion forums, because discussions work better without jerks. But I also value free for all spaces, because they guarantee that messages can't be silenced, no matter how unpopular and illegal they are.
ArneBab 8y ago
When did you last look at Freenet? When did you last check the moderated discussion boards? (FMS) There’s a lot of original non-scum user content on Freenet nowadays.

cantthinkofone 8y ago

I'd like to see what can be done with anonymity but with more filters. When this software was first designed, AI-driven content classification was virtually nonexistent. If bots can be designed to be moderators, I'm thinking if you were to fuse that functionality to an anonymous data storage, you would be able to ensure only productive content enters storage, and content that is irrelevant can be excluded. Of course that bot would need to know precisely what it should exclude from storage which seems hard to define.