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.
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.
> 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.