Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
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Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#2My brother worked on freenet it was cool until tor came up and supplanted it
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#3Does anyone still use Freenet? What happened with it?
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#4I'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.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#5I'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.
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.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#6I'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.
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.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#7I'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.
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.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#8My brother worked on freenet it was cool until tor came up and supplanted it
No, not tor. I guess ipfs would be somewhat similar today, but it has its own problems and I don't see it succeeding either.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#9I'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.
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.
Re: Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (2000) [pdf]
#10I'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.
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 perm…
> 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.