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I've not tried Freenet for a few years, but every time I did it was very slow; e.g. browsing basic HTML sites hosted on Freenet was quite painful. IPFS can serv

I've not tried Freenet for a few years, but every time I did it was very slow; e.g. browsing basic HTML sites hosted on Freenet was quite painful. IPFS can serve streaming video, and host massive archives like Wikipedia. Also, Freenet actively seeks out data from the network to store locally, to give plausible deniability to users (there's no way to tell if something is locally cached because the user requested it, or whether the client fetched it automatically). IIRC this can be disabled by limiting oneself to a whitelist of peers (preventing network chatter that might reveal Freenet's presence). IPFS will only cache what's requested, so it's more predictable and useful for building infrastructure (e.g. hosting assets for a normal Web site); and presumably leaner on data requirements too. IPFS isn't really competing with Freenet IMHO; it's competing with HTTP and BitTorrent.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
> I've not tried Freenet for a few years, but every time I did it was very slow It has become a lot faster recently, try again :) When I look at its statistics during active usage it can easily show 1 MiB/s traffic. You still can't expect HTML to load in sub-second delays, for large multi-MiB sites it may take a low single-digit amount of seconds, but there is an inherent cost to anonymity which probably induces a boundary on how fast things can be: To achieve anonymity, data needs to be redirected across multiple people so the sender and recipient can't determine who each other of them is. Redirecting stuff across a longer path than necessary slows things down.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > To achieve anonymity, data needs to be redirected across multiple people so the sender and recipient can't determine who each other of them is. > > Redirecting stuff across a longer path than necessary slows things down. That's skipping past a lot of details. There are still choices there. Freenet traded speed, efficiency and scalsbility for a specific security model. There are anonoyminity systems (e.g. tor) that are much more efficient but have different trade-offs.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago

> I've not tried Freenet for a few years, but every time I did it was very slow It has become a lot faster recently, try again :) When I look at its statistics during active usage it can easily show 1 MiB/s traffic. You still can't expect HTML to load in sub-second delays, for large multi-MiB sites it may take a low single-digit amount of seconds, but there is an inherent cost to anonymity which probably induces a boundary on how fast things can be: To achieve anonymity, data needs to be redirected across multiple people so the sender and recipient can't determine who each other of them is. Redirecting stuff across a longer path than necessary slows things down.

bawolff 6y ago
> To achieve anonymity, data needs to be redirected across multiple people so the sender and recipient can't determine who each other of them is. > > Redirecting stuff across a longer path than necessary slows things down. That's skipping past a lot of details. There are still choices there. Freenet traded speed, efficiency and scalsbility for a specific security model. There are anonoyminity systems (e.g. tor) that are much more efficient but have different trade-offs.