HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

> 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.

Let’s imagine a real path to market: some big 5 company offers a “Facebook accelerator” usb compute stick that you put on your network and it provides local access and resiliency.

DNS and CDNs may have solved this problem in a limited context, but they're hardly accessible, and are too dependent on centralized infrastructure for a lot of peoples' needs.

I hear you on the added complexity of it all, and I think that's why its taken so long for this stuff to be developed. It's been stewing for a long time. LANs have been around since before the internet, but a lot of stuff that's relatively easy on the internet is much, much harder in distributed and mesh networks. I think we're currently witnessing an epiphany.

Having the ability to recognize the same resource, and to request it, from multiple, disparate devices in just about any network setting is a totally different level.

And on a human level, I believe it could foster healthier social interactions around the sharing of digital content. When content is in its infancy, these kinds of applications create incentives, however slight they may be, to share it in closer physical proximity to people. It gives us back the awesome joy of the LAN party. Facebook says "you need to share your content via ISP and it must be stored on our servers at all times." Whereas distributed network applications invite us to imagine more humane, local, trusted environments for sharing digital content. If you want to share old family videos, get together for dinner, watch them on the TV and then share them privately over the WIFI. If you're in a band, make arrangements with local cafes to host your album. People who come for coffee will have the best bandwidth on it. If you're an artist, host your portfolio on your phone. Share it with people like you'd share a business card. If they like it, they may choose to help seed it, even without your asking. We're talking about the internet for LANs.

This stuff has the potential to refresh the art of digital collection and curation, something that's been co-opted by centralized content providers.

Clearly not.

It's not a non-issue just because people boosting a technology say it is. Ever heard of timing attacks?