[HN Gopher] Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web
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Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web
Author : udev4096
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-10-27 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (freenet.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (freenet.org)
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Would love to see some network like Freenet start to see more
| adoption - it seems obvious that we need something like this.
| GNUnet seems to have some interesting ideas and good motivations
| too.
|
| I will admit that I didn't follow the renaming or possibly
| forking or whatever happened to freenet / hyphanet / etc back
| last when I was reading about this. If someone could explain it
| clearly that would be stellar.
| garydevenay wrote:
| Nostr (https://nostr.com/) is doing reasonably- though I think
| most apps are still in the social media realm.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Not judging technically, but there are reasons I wouldn't
| touch it with a 10 meters pole.
|
| https://archive.ph/TLwch
| EGreg wrote:
| I wonder how much Freenet would be considered "web3" and
| "blockchain" by the HN crowd, considering it explicitly uses
| smart contracts and transactions signed by self-custodied
| private keys
|
| Guess it's all in how you present things and what terms you
| avoid :)
|
| For what it's worth, I am interested very much in decentralized
| systems and smart contracts, having built them and also running
| a YouTube channel where I interviewed people behind the
| projects... including Ian Clarke and freenet:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
| tg180 wrote:
| Personally, I don't consider Freenet and Hyphanet to be
| "blockchain" in the modern sense, and given how much the
| meaning of "web3" has changed in recent years, I think it
| might evolve further.
|
| Freenet stands apart with goals and ideals that are quite
| different from today's distributed applications, with a
| stronger focus on privacy and access to information.
|
| Neither Freenet nor Hyphanet are linked to cryptocurrencies
| or financial speculation. I see them as decentralized
| networks created to ensure freedom of expression, privacy,
| and access to information in an anonymous and censorship-
| resistant way, without any intrinsic connection to
| cryptocurrencies or financial systems. And that's great!
|
| I also believe the project has gained a certain credibility
| over time, thanks to the consistent work and vision of its
| developers.
|
| I'll check out your interview with Ian Clarke!
| sanity wrote:
| Freenet and Hyphanet aren't blockchain, although the
| original Freenet did pioneer the cryptographic contract
| back in 2000 (we called them "signed subspace keys"), which
| a few years later would form the basis for Bitcoin.
|
| Freenet is designed to be a general-purpose platform for
| building and distributing decentralized systems like group
| chat[1], social networks, search, really anything that
| people use the Internet for today. Some people think of
| blockchain this way but blockchain is much more specialized
| (eg. group chat on blockchain wouldn't scale).
|
| [1] https://github.com/freenet/river
| sanity wrote:
| > I will admit that I didn't follow the renaming or possibly
| forking or whatever happened to freenet / hyphanet / etc back
| last when I was reading about this. If someone could explain it
| clearly that would be stellar.
|
| The reasons for the renaming are addressed directly in
| Freenet's FAQ[1]:
|
| # Why was Freenet rearchitected and rebranded?
|
| In 2019, Ian began developing a successor to the original
| Freenet, internally named "Locutus." This redesign was a
| ground-up reimagining, incorporating lessons learned from the
| original Freenet and addressing modern challenges. The original
| Freenet, although groundbreaking, was built for an earlier era.
|
| This isn't the first time Freenet has undergone significant
| changes. Around 2005, we transitioned from version 0.5 to 0.7,
| which was a complete rewrite introducing "friend-to-friend"
| networking.
|
| In March 2023, the original Freenet (developed from 2005
| onwards) was spun off into an independent project called
| "Hyphanet" under its existing maintainers. Concurrently,
| "Locutus" was rebranded as "Freenet," also known as "Freenet
| 2023," to signal this new direction and focus. The
| rearchitected Freenet is faster, more flexible, and better
| equipped to offer a robust, decentralized alternative to the
| increasingly centralized web.
|
| To ease the transition the old freenetproject.org domain was
| redirected to hyphanet's website, while the recently acquired
| freenet.org domain was used for the new architecture.
|
| It is important to note that the maintainers of the original
| Freenet did not agree with the decision to rearchitect and
| rebrand. However, as the architect of the Freenet Project, and
| after over a year of debate, Ian felt this was the necessary
| path forward to ensure the project's continued relevance and
| success in a world far different than when he designed the
| previous architecture.
|
| [1] https://freenet.org/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-
| and-r...
| wutwutwat wrote:
| www is already decentralized
| _nalply wrote:
| To some extent yes.
|
| However to host something yourself you need a lot of things,
| for example FTTH to host it at your home, or a hosting
| provider; then a domain name and other things. These can be
| taken away from you.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| How does freenet let you own something outright?
| sanity wrote:
| On Freenet you own things cryptographically, typically by
| possessing a private key.
|
| This is similar to a Bitcoin wallet although Freenet isn't
| a cryptocurrency, it's a general-purpose platform for
| building and distributing scalable decentralized services.
| arcticbull wrote:
| You don't need fiber to host basic services, and once you do,
| it's not really a problem.
| squarefoot wrote:
| You need a public IP, though, and many home contracts put
| customers behind NAT.
| lottin wrote:
| Your point being?
| _nalply wrote:
| When many people have the ability to publish independently
| without relying on a central service, then it's
| decentralized. The World Wide Web was initially designed to
| be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to
| the internet could host a web server.
|
| In practice, however, this didn't quite work out. Most
| people publish through centralized services like Instagram,
| to name just one.
|
| There are two main obstacles to achieving decentralization.
| The first is technical difficulty: not everyone wants to
| learn how to run a web server. The second is reliance on
| foundational services like domain names and hosting, which
| can be revoked. For example, if the authorities think you
| did something illegal, boom, your domain name got
| confiscated.
|
| So, no, in practice, the World Wide Web isn't truly
| decentralized. But at least there remains some possibility
| for it.
| sanity wrote:
| Theoretically you can run a web server at home but you'll have
| a problem if you start to get a lot of traffic or you have
| trouble with your internet connection. Your website will be
| trivially easy to DDoS.
|
| Services you create on Freenet will scale automatically and are
| immune to DDoS.
| coldblues wrote:
| The old Freenet project is now named Hyphanet and is available at
| https://www.hyphanet.org/index.html
| bbor wrote:
| Fascinating! I thought this was cool as I clicked through, I'm
| glad to see that it's been a dramatic topic for 25 years, not
| just some new idea. Hyphanet seems more openly political, which
| makes sense but is kinda a hard sell for me after seeing the
| impact Bitcoin had on US citizens vis-a-vis scams, hacks, and
| misc. bad actors. But maybe that's a sacrifice worth making in
| the name of residents of less free nation states?
|
| Either way, pretty funny when a software project has to tackle
| questions like "what is property in the modern era?" and "what
| is free speech?" in their FAQ. That's how you know you're
| really pushing against the status quo, I guess...
| chx wrote:
| > after seeing the impact Bitcoin had on US citizens
|
| That's an odd way of putting it, as if crypto scams were
| limited to the US.
| 76j76j wrote:
| Those scams are not isolated to Bitcoin. You see them in many
| content creator industries. They are giveaway scams and
| templated to fit a niche. You can do them for gambling,
| gaming like cs-go skin giveaways, makeup giveaways and so on.
| They are really easy scams to do because you can just wait
| for the next trendy thing to happen and then target that
| trend with bot accounts. On youtube they will often just
| recycle what accounts don't get reported.
|
| Platforms do their best to take care of this, but these scams
| are so easy to run that you can automate them and spin up new
| accounts very quickly. Even if there are financial barriers
| it can still be madly profitable to accept the costs.
|
| There is no clear way to deal with the concerns you
| mentioned, but I think playing too safe and not exploring
| technology will quickly put you behind the curb. Most of it
| can be resolved with good financial regulation.
| bbor wrote:
| I mean, I was more referencing the big epidemic in the US
| recently, "pig butchering" -- basically catfishing with
| more money involved. Certainly no system alone can make it
| impossible, but I think even the biggest crypto fans in the
| world should acknowledge that it makes it much easier, and
| thus much more common. "Go to this website" is a lot
| easier/more reasonable ask than "scratch off 20 gift cards
| and send me the codes", or whatever western mutual is
| timbit42 wrote:
| Fiat currencies are also used for scams, hacks, etc. Does
| that make fiat currencies a hard sell for you as well?
| bbor wrote:
| It's about rates, accessibility, incentives, and other
| society-level statistics. There are scams that have become
| much more common thanks to the affordances of untraceable,
| unmanaged online currencies, which shouldn't really
| surprise anyone.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Ha, looks like I missed a 2023 drama when the original Freenet
| was renamed to Hyphanet, and Locutus became Freenet
| (https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html;
| https://freenet.org/faq/#how-do-the-previous-and-current-ver...)
|
| I used to check out the original version a few times in the past.
| I loved the overall premise of a uncensored network (for the
| context: I lived in an authoritorian country that doubled down on
| censoring online communications), but no system I've tried out
| (Freenet, ZeroNet, I2P, Tor) grew on me. Too much, uh, weird
| stuff (or worse), while interesting content was pretty sparse.
| And I don't produce anything worthy of sharing myself.
|
| The tech could be there, but the society is not. [Not]
| surprisingly, the social demand seems to be all focused on to
| work around the Internet censorship with very limited interest in
| bootstrapping something that would be resistant. At scale, humans
| always pick the cheapest/lowest-effort option, even if it's
| obviously sub-optimal and even if it leads nowhere we want (or so
| I think) to be.
| jc_sec wrote:
| This was my experience with matrix.org, mostly pedos and far
| right extremists or other weird anti social characters . Turned
| me off from these kinds of platforms big time.
| nemomarx wrote:
| if every bar in town bans nazis or punks, even if the last
| bar has high minded ideals you kinda know which clientele
| they'll get
| timbit42 wrote:
| Those people also use the public roads. Are you also turned
| off from driving on public roads?
| fragmede wrote:
| To be fair, everyone with a commute who had or has to sit
| in endless traffic is turned off from driving on public
| roads and wishes there were fewer vehicles or that they
| were the only one on the road.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Paraphrased, "I was driving home, stuck in traffic, and
| this thought occurred to me, now I know this is bad, but
| I thought, if half of everyone in this city died, I'd be
| home by now." - Paul Reiser
| Arathorn wrote:
| if you're talking about the matrix.org homeserver's room
| directory - these rooms are strictly against our terms of use
| (section 6 of https://matrix.org/legal/terms-and-conditions/)
| and we shut them down, and these days have even frozen the
| roomdir to stop them appearing.
|
| if you're talking about the wider network - yes, there's a
| subset of abusive users... just like on the web, or the
| internet, or email, etc. Unfortunately there's nothing we can
| do about; it comes with the territory of being an open
| network where anyone can participate.
|
| My experience of Matrix is more that it's full of FOSS
| projects like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GNOME, KDE
| etc... as well as lots of government users. But ymmv. If you
| are still seeing abusive rooms as a matter of course, please
| route details to abuse@matrix.org, where we do actually act
| on them (if they are on servers we control)
| angelorue wrote:
| I haven't seen any pedos or far-right extremists. Quite the
| contrary really
| berkeleynerd wrote:
| The solution to this, at least in the case of Tor, is for
| existing sites (e.g., Wordpress, medium, etc...) to provide
| one-click onion-site publishing support.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I don't think it's a technical problem. Hosting or accessing
| a site on distributed networks is no more complicated than
| running or hosting a VPN (e.g.
| https://novayagazeta.eu/vpnovaya), and organizations host
| them just fine, and layman people were proven to be capable
| of setting up client software when they were forced to (e.g.
| Instagram or YouTube bans in Russia).
|
| I see it as a more of a chicken-and-egg issue. Publishers
| don't come because there's no audience, audience doesn't come
| because there are no publishers. Plus, there is no
| recognition of distributed networks as a solution to
| censorship - the current non-enthusiast view of them ranges
| from "haven't heard about it" through "tried it, found it
| useless" all the way to "it's only for pedos and nazis",
| which is extremely harmful for any meaningful and socially
| beneficial adoption, of course.
|
| I'm not sure if those are the actual reasons. Certainly not a
| technical issue, though.
| sanity wrote:
| The new Freenet (formerly Locutus) is more of a communication
| than a storage medium, which should make it less susceptible to
| the kind of problems you're referring to. That said, even on
| Hyphanet you really need to look for something bad to find it
| as the default indexes are curated.
|
| We're also developing a decentralized reputation system based
| on the "web of trust" concept. This system is intended to help
| filter out antisocial content--like spam or worse--without
| relying on any central authority.
| EGreg wrote:
| I interviewed the founder of the original freenet and the current
| freenet, Ian Clarke (among others) on our channel about
| decentralized systems, might be interesting for the people here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
|
| It is on our channel https://youtube.com/Intercoin where I tried
| for a few years to have really deep dives with some of the too
| people on technology, sociopolitics and regulations around
| decentralized systems.
| tejtm wrote:
| On the mention "original freenet"
|
| In the late 1980s early 1990s, FreeNet was not (just) a web
| domain name.
|
| Freenet was decentralized idea of how the public (me) could get
| on the internet without already being a member of a privileged
| institution (or rich and sophisticated).
|
| I believe the idea of what the freenet was prior to becoming a
| brandname is worthy of being remembered.
|
| I'm not much of a tube clicker here, so apologies if this is
| redundant with the video.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Did Freenet ever get over its "content moderation" problem? Don't
| want to summon the FBI.
| immibis wrote:
| resisting censorship is fundamentally at odds with supporting
| censorship
| sanity wrote:
| The new Freenet is more of a communication than a storage
| medium which makes content moderation less of an issue, but
| we're planning to build a decentralized reputation system based
| on the idea of "web of trust" that should do at least as good a
| job of protecting people from stuff they don't want to see as
| today's centralized services.
| nanolith wrote:
| While Locutus is an improvement on the previous Hyphanet model,
| I'm still concerned about the caching model. In Hyphanet, data
| would be cached the more it was used, and peers connected over
| multiple hops. This had the potential to cause huge headaches as
| authorities began investigating issues such as CSAM, because
| their understanding of how caching and requests work did not
| match up with how it actually worked. While, certainly, one could
| build a subset darknet, all it takes is one bad peer to expose
| the whole darknet to prosecution.
|
| I played with Freenet when it first came out, but when I realized
| the implications of this -- which later turned out to be true --
| I destroyed the hard drive I had been using to run Freenet, just
| in case.
|
| Locutus seems less aggressive about caching data, but it still
| does some caching. Without really digging into the documentation
| or source code, I'd still be nervous about running it.
| immibis wrote:
| Under EU rules (Digital Services Act) I believe an automated
| cache is treated similarly to a pipe - you're no more
| responsible for holding content in your cache (especially if
| encrypted!) than a Tor node operator is for someone accessing
| it through Tor.
|
| German police did raid the home of a guy who ran a lot of Tor
| nodes. Authoritarians don't need any technical excuse to raid
| your home - they can just do it if they want to scare you away
| from these platforms, regardless of how they work.
| nanolith wrote:
| Unfortunately, US case law is murkier. There have been some
| notable convictions of people using the old Freenet to search
| or host CSAM. However, the digital forensics used in these
| cases was pretty sketchy. If someone simply caching data from
| downstream queries were held to the same standard, they'd
| also be considered guilty.
|
| I have no doubt that there was other evidence that led to the
| conviction of these individuals. But, I can only go on what I
| know, and what I know is that the standard of digital
| forensics evidence in those cases was subpar.
| sanity wrote:
| Locutus (now Freenet) is more of a communication than a storage
| medium. It's focused more on allowing people to build
| decentralized tools like group chat[1] for realtime
| communication than be a content distribution network like
| bittorrent.
|
| We're also planning a decentralized reputation system based on
| the concept of "web of trust" that should do at least as good a
| job of ensuring users aren't exposed to unwanted content like
| spam or worse.
|
| [1] https://github.com/freenet/river
| nanolith wrote:
| That is reassuring. I hope that your team can build this web
| of trust, because it really is crucial.
|
| It is great to have a tool that allows ideas to be shared,
| but I think that consent regarding which ideas are shared or
| promoted is important, not only from a legal perspective, but
| also from an ethical one.
| sanity wrote:
| Agreed, any system that allows people to discover content
| needs to protect them from stuff they don't want to see,
| whether it's annoyances like spam, malicious attacks like
| DDoS, or extremely harmful content like CSAM.
|
| Centralized services don't do a great job of this but I
| think we can do better with a decentralized approach.
|
| We won't have a perfect solution overnight but we've
| already built important components of such a system (eg.
| ghost keys[1]).
|
| [1] https://freenet.org/news/introducing-ghost-keys/
| angelorue wrote:
| It seems interesting, I've seen this before, but i'm lost. How do
| I get it, does it incorporate with the OG internet or what?
| sanity wrote:
| We haven't launched yet but we're very[1] close, hopefully just
| days away as we tie up loose ends.
|
| This[2] diagram hopefully gives a big-picture view of where
| Freenet fits in. You install the Freenet software (which is
| tiny, less than 10MB) and then you can access Freenet through
| your web browser just like with the world wide web. The
| difference is that there are no servers or datacenters, it's
| all decentralized.
|
| [1] https://freenet.org/news/weekly-dev-meeting-2024-10-11/
|
| [2] https://docs.freenet.org
| okasaki wrote:
| Interesting that the new freenet is written in rust.
|
| I always thought the worst part of freenet was that it required
| java.
|
| I haven't used freenet in a long time. Last time I did I'm pretty
| sure satoshi was posting the og bitcoin releases on the message
| board (freechat?). Crazy times.
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