I've run Freenet twice in the last twenty years. Maybe 2006, 2012? Each time CSAM was surprisingly visible. Maybe these days it's kicked off to a corner but back then it was pretty much a click away.
I'm going to have to say if that's the basic motivation for censorship resistant communication in the USA, I am disappointed and sad.
Wonder if it's actually useful in places where you actually have censorship, or if it's just a nice beacon for the ISP to send the rubber hose men to visit.
Not to mention random links purporting to be terrorist manuals, normal porn, incoherent blogs and the other usual detritus.
That was my experience too, the few times I tried it. I haven't been back for just that reason. There's nothing that I can do on there that I can't do on the real internet and even the tiniest risk of CSAM material reaching my machine is not worth it.
It's sad but I think in most modern democracies that are relatively free, like the USA and EU, the primary use for these services is CSAM. There's no other reason to use it, except maybe paranoia or technical curiosity, and only the former will keep someone using it. The technically curious will move on quite quickly.
" There's no other reason to use it, except maybe paranoia or technical curiosity,"
How about idealism?
I mean 20 years ago, you would have been declared paranoid, if you said secret government agencies and big corporations track everything you do online - but now you just speak a inconvinient truth, most people are aware of, but try to ignore it as much as possible.
It is good, to have working alternative plattforms, in case there are really needed by us in the west.
But yeah, currently I do not use them either, because my last experience with them were "dark", too.
Because yes, the strongest incentive right now have those people not acting out of idealism, but because their content is not tolerated on the open web. Quite a shitty situation. How do one establish a "alternative, anonymous" communication service, without attracting all the kicked out elsewhere btards first?
Have you ever been threatened by a right-wing extremist that they would come to your house when you answered their hatred online and pointed out the flaws in their logic?
I have been.
That’s why I deeply appreciate having a pseudonym that’s separated from where I live so I don’t have to fear Neonazis turning up at my doorstep or attacking my kids when I write something they do not like.
If y'all only try to see if there is CSAM and then uninstall when you succeed, then of course the CSAM percentage will become high because only the CSAM perverts do not leave!
So instead keep using it and actually put the other content onto it yourself!
Hosting on Freenet is free and easy, you just upload a site and post it to FMS and it will be online for many years if people keep accessing it.
You don't need any server whatsoever: The machines of the other users store content which you upload (in an encrypted fashion so they cannot censor it and aren't legally culpable for it). It automatically gets replicated to more machines as it becomes more popular, thus good content stays available for a very long time and unpopular content gets garbage-collected.
So put your "money", i.e. effort, where your mouth is:
Don't just only constantly criticize FAANG for lack of privacy and censorship.
Instead, also take care of actively maintaining the spaces which provide privacy & freedom so they don't become barren.
A free public space which is only controlled by the general public needs the general public to take care of it.
Honestly, both times I wanted to see what was there. It provided no material benefit over, say, tilde.town, with added (1) legal risk (CSAM) and (2) ethical risk (providing some hosting to CSAM).
There's this thing where a certain level of censorship resistance and free speech seems to yield some very horrible things. I don't even want to remark on the US law (first amendment rights, legal analysis) here, just focusing on ethics.
> A free public space which is only controlled by the general public needs the general public to take care of it.
I would remark here that the traditional system for taking care of a general space is to have a government controlling it, whether that be the council of elders, a senate, or a monarch. Fully democratic/anarchist space management is not typical of a human society. The historical outcome of fully unregulated online spaces seems to be a lot of CSAM and groupthink.
anyway. freenet is technically interesting, legally dodgy, and, imho, an ethical trap.
I have no ethical obligation to move my assets onto a corrupt network in order to reduce the percentage of illegal material there, no.
This is a ridiculous position.
The network is flawed. It's not hard to provide anonymity and yet still be able to remove child pornography.
Stop being an apologist for a network that delivers child pornography. Absolutely nothing makes this unfixable except the creators' dedication to making false ethical arguments.
I've used Freenet and I2P heavily on and off for years. It still baffles me how people don't understand the mentality behind using Freenet. Censorship resistant platforms help keep society free, yes. And they are sometimes abused by bad people just like any other tool, yes. But they are so much more than that.
Do you remember the early internet? The Internet before JavaScript, ads, and commercialization was everywhere? Do you remember surfing through homemade webpages that someone put a lot of thought and effort into? Do you remember usenet? Do you remember not even imagining that some corporation or government was collecting your data in-bulk?
That's Freenet. It's the internet that should have been.
I came for the memes and I stayed for the community. FMS and WoT (Freenet Message System and Web of Trust) use trust lists to decide what I see and most people who use FMS and Sone (sort of like Twitter) are decent. Pedo's and generally bad people typically use Frost-Next, a third party application that the Freenet Project does not endorse that is susceptible to spam. I have had so many in-depth, thought-provoking discussions on FMS over the years. Far more than any other clearnet website today, Reddit included. There is a real sense of community on Freenet you'll be hard pressed to find elsewhere.
I enjoy making websites and writing. Freenet hosts numerous websites (freesites) I have made over the years and a ton of my political and philosophical writings. I just finished making a Super Mario 64 Freesite in honor of one of my favorite video games. I spent a lot of time working on it and I'm proud of it. That's just for Freenet. I live in the United States too, and this is what I use Freenet for. I also host the Astronomy Picture Of the Day freesite I update everyday. You don't have to need censorship resistance to use Freenet, it's existence merely safeguards the prerequisite to all real civil liberties in the digital age-- privacy. I am convinced that the existence of Freenet and tools like it (especially Tor) are necessary for a free society to exist.
I2P is great too and I'm just as passionate about that, though it's been awhile since my servers have been up. Same philosophy of censorship resistance, but with I2P you have to run a server 24/7 to host content and can have dynamic content as well. Freenet is more distributed. I2P is like Tor but is more used by nerds than criminals. Both I2P and Freenet are amazing tools. I highly recommend people to check them out.
Decentralized platforms need signed messages, signed upvotes / downvotes, and an open ranking algorithm otherwise they can never be an alternative to centralized systems like Twitter
Censorship shouldnt be the central focus. The real hope is that from 1000 ranking algorithms, we can find one that isn't a divisiveness amplifier
I am glad it evolved a bit, it used to host a lot of child porn, nazi/fascist material etc And clearly you would be exposed to it through messages or not well annotated index.
This is interesting, I don't remember seeing more than trace amounts of “nazi/fascist material” there at all. Sure, someone has probably thought that the world needs another copy of Mein Kampf, or has had a real important story of how Jews did 9/11, and maybe these freesites are still (partially) available after a decade or so (I am not at all bothered to check, to be honest), but general amount of such loonies has definitely been at the usual level of any decently sized internet community. As for Freenet forum systems, I can only remember a prolific Frost spammer who was either a persistent troll, or a mentally ill person, neither of which is unfamiliar to experienced internet users. It seems to me that some mental inertia has made you continue the list of “offensive content” with “nazi/fascist material, etc.” after you've mentioned “child porn”.
What I don't understand is the word “exposed”. Let's take Mein Kampf, for example. I am sure have hit upon it on the internet multiple times over the years. I am sure anyone can find its text in no time, even if their native country banned it. Still it never occurred to me to start reading it. It would really be a joke, and I have nearly endless list of better things to read. I guess I was “exposed” to Mein Kampf, so what?
Freenet requires your hard drive to allocate ~2GB of raw space of encrypted unknown data that basically makes your machine a "node" in the network. Whatever is in that cache you will never be able to know, as it's encrypted in a way that querying is based on encrypted hops and an associated TTL like feature.
It's incredibly slow (think Tor over Tor over Tor), and needs to be run for 1-2 weeks to even work mildly. Tails would not be an ideal choice, a dedicated space is necessary.
There's no real reason to use Tor to connect to Freenet anyway, as it's encrypted in a way that the network traffic cannot be known nor even the content on your machine by yourself unless you know the private key which serves as a link to the content you are trying to locate, and it eventually will sync up those keys with your local storage. You don't even know the public key of the content that is stored in this local cache.
If you've seen Silicon Valley, this is the idea that likely founded "the Platform" concept, but they add a bit of magic and speed to the concept for the show. When your content is published, it's published "everywhere and nowhere". If you publish something, then destroy your node, that content will stay in many nodes and still be accessible. This information gets kept or cleared out based on how often it is being queried.
What I see are mostly opinion blogs (lots of technical and political stuff), forums and some media-sites. The most recent pretty unique site I saw was a mario64 fansite.
I like the fact that I can expose a machine using tor. Its .onion address becomes something analog to a public ip address[0]. It even works behind a nat, so I can ssh to a machine of mine from anywhere in the world. The problem: the other point must support tor to access it.
Anyone knows a way using these overlay networks, tor, i2p, freenet, to expose a service on a machine behind a NAT to be accessed through the internet without the need of clients needing special software?
Freenet is not a point-to-point network. I.e. you cannot address a specific computer on Freenet by something like an IP.
(Well you can, but you shouldn't want to, will explain below.)
Freenet is a datastore: It addresses content, not computers.
So a Freenet address points to a file or a directory of files (a zip). The addresses can be versioned so files/dirs can be updated.
A file/dir may be stored anywhere in Freenet. Where it is stored is not known - the machines which store it are anonymous so censorship is prevented. If many people request a file, it will get stored on more machines automatically.
Now of course you can make a specific computer constantly publish new versions of a file to "send" data like on IP and poll for a remote file to receive data. This can emulate direct connections and does work.
But it invalidates the whole point of Freenet:
Freenet wants to be censorship-resistant, so content should not rely on a single computer to keep existing because that is a single point of failure.
You cannot do that through freenet though : freenet does not work in a server-client way. At its core, it is more like ipfs : it shares static files. That means you can share static websites / blogs / even mail and bbs. All serverless though
If you don't want additional software requirements client side, then it means you need a publicly-routable IP address on your server, or at least publicly-routable IP/port pairs. This can be achieved in a few ways:
- use a VPN from a net-neutral ISP to obtain a real public IP address over VPN (5-10€/mo)
- route specific ports to your own machine from an internet-facing server (via SSH/Wireguard/VPN tunnels) ; unfortunately it makes it impossible for different people (backend servers) to share a single routable port
- reverse proxy specific protocols to a backend server, using for example TLS SNI (or eSNI) headers ; a single internet-facing server can serve many different vhosts to separate backends, where TLS encryption is terminated on the backend
But of course you can run tor/i2p and other crypto-secure routing protocols (yggdrasil, zeronet, cjdns...) to expand the ways to reach your server. I'm unaware of good protocol-agnostic address discovery... for tor we usually do TOFU over DNS (eg. onionMX records) or HTTPS (HTTP2 Alt-SVC headers). The GNU Name System, at least on paper, sounds like the perfect crypto-secure naming scheme that could securely bootstrap addresses from names, but i don't think it has broad adoption yet.
I stay away from it because chunks of the data is hosted on your local machine, and it could potentially contain very unsavory data. Sure it's encrypted but try to explain that to your local law enforcement.
Freenet does not give you the decryption keys to the data you host, you don't know what you're hosting, hence you're not responsible for what it could be decrypted to.
And even if law enforcement could successfully convince a court that you're doing something illegal by hosting data which you cannot look into:
They couldn't first acquire the necessary search warrant because they couldn't prove that you are the one who is hosting the particular piece of illegal data: Freenet's routing algorithm is anonymized, both the people who retrieve data and the people who store it are anonymous. (Disclaimer: The security of the anonymization depends on how you've configured Freenet. In the less secure modes a well-funded attacker can de-anonymize you.)
So if law enforcement knows a certain file is evil then they cannot easily find out the IP addresses of the people who store it, and the people who store it don't know that they are doing so.
But if somebody downloads the data, and they can track the source to your computer, do they even have to decrypt it on your computer? (I mean does law enforcement have to decrypt it on your computer, or could they just indirectly prove you hosted the data).
They might've purchased a decryption key from some dark corner of the internet and after failing to trace the money to the bad-guy they're now hoping to track him down by IP address. Probably it would surface in court that you're not the bad guy they're after, but who knows what kind of bad things they'll do to you in the meantime.
Aaron Jones (a cop) literally gave an introduction to his local Linux Usergroup to Freenet explaining what it is and how much he loves it. You can find that on the Freenet Project's website.
You're only going to have a few encrypted chunks of a given file in your datastore, you don't know what the file chunks are when put together or the key used to decrypt it. Information is neutral on Freenet. You would NOT get in trouble just for running a Freenet node in any sane/ free country in the world. If you go out of your way to use Freenet for something illegal, that's another matter entirely.
If you're paranoid, just use a VPN or install it to a VPS and SSH into it.
-- Freenet was designed and conceived as a datastore, fist and foremost, whereas i2p using 'garlic routing' was apt for any IP protocol proxied over it (a bit like tor)
-- Freenet therefore is more efficient and distributing popular data
-- There are some concerns about the algoirthms behind freenet's anonymity, which i2p claims [1] are troublesome.
-- Incidentally, I have heard complaints about the crypto behind i2p, but I am not expert in this area enough to comment. My understanding is that the consensus is that "tor r is better", but note you can e.g. run freenet over tor if desired.
I played with both as a curious teenager around the time they were released. I am now largely terrified to, because of the prospect of accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very high on both platforms.
You're not likely to find child porn on Tor anymore unless you go looking for it. It's there, because Tor is much bigger than Freenet and I2P, but it's out the way. The hidden wikis were all cleaned up years ago. I bet the drug marketplaces thought it was bad for business to be listed alongside that sort of thing.
Freenet is the same as it ever was. I don't think you could play around on there and not find that stuff. Dunno what's going on on I2P these days.
To find CSAM on Freenet nowadays you have to go out of your way to search for it. All the default index pages (entry points) filter out content that is illegal by itself (as CSAM is), and if you talk about that in FMS or Sone you’ll quickly find your pseudonym blocked by most accounts.
There is one more key difference - I2P has C++ implementation[1] which allows it to be run on the low-performance machines, e.g. routers. It is impossible in case of Java. I wish it had been Rust, though...
Why would it be impossible to run Java on low performance machines? There have been mobile and embedded Java implementations for literally decades. C++ doesn't magically imbue a program with performance superpowers either.
It's lazy to equate implementation language with performance profile.
To answer your question, better? Neither I2P nor Freenet claim to be inherently better than the other. It depends entirely on what you are using Freenet or I2P for.
I2P is like Tor but internal (it does not mainly anonymize clearnet traffic, think onionland) and it is anonymous by default. How anonymous? Theoretically as anonymous as Tor. You can use I2P for torrents and filesharing, pretty fast irc, etc. To host an eepsite (I2P site) you have to run a server and keep it running as long as you want the site to be up, similar to running a Tor hidden service or any server on the clearnet.
Freenet has a lot more static content (no JavaScript), reminds one of the early internet (in a good way, mostly). Hosting of freesites (Freenet sites) and files is distributed, no need to run a server to have your site up. There is no 'delete' button on Freenet either. Files/ sites are deleted when no one accesses them for a time. Popular content stays forever. Sites under 2MB in size typically stay forever. Freenet is not anonymous by default, you need to know people IRL who use it to create a friend-to-friend darknet for it to be anonymous. I use mine with a VPN.
Both networks are great, lots of cool people use them. I use FMS a lot (Freenet Message System, similar to Usenet) and Sone. When I use I2P I usually host a few eepsites and hang around Irc2p (I2P's irc). I recommend installing and using both. They're both great.
They are different things. I2P is a transport layer, freenet is a (imo weird) combination of transport layer and distributed storage. So, running IRC over freenet (for instance) isn't a thing. Personally my take is that freenet is conceptually not as interesting as running bittorrent over i2p, but YMMV.
Freenet implements low latency queue and allows for near-realtime communication over distributed storage. Specifically, “IRC over Freenet” WAS made long time ago. You get modem-like delays and bandwidth, but is this a problem? Trying to use it when someone is actively searching for you is a different story, because there's a balance between sending data and being detectable.
You're mostly right. There is FLIP (basically irc for Freenet) but as you can imagine it's very slow. No such thing as instant messaging on Freenet. You can theoretically stream live video at low resolution (with a large delay) but it's not really designed for dynamic content.
And then you find out, whether your moderation works.
Point in case: On Freenet it does. But I had to close down my youtube comments on my channel completely when they discovered my youtube-Account. Because it’s the clearnet where moderation sucks.
No, I definitely want absolute free speech so folks can safely talk about taboo subjects. Not being able to have a forum to discuss taboo subjects is a creeping evil, IMO.
Just because I don't agree with Nazis who want to take my guns away, doesn't mean I want to censor them. It's much more useful to engage with them and get into an open discussion. I stand up for their right to say whatever they like because it's a foundational human right. Think old ACLU or NPR before they went full authoritarian and now fully embrace censorship.
If the question is WHO to censor, I've always thought the solution is not at the server side but on the client side. Any platform where sensitive topics are being discussed (conspiracies for example) is going to be spammed, trolled, forum slided, etc. The solution is to have filtering on the client side take away the spam. Similar to how you have ad lists which block adsense, googleanalytics, etc. Allow ALL speech, and then filter out just the ones you want. Much better than having a tyrannical government or corrupt media or powerful tech giants do it for me.
That's nice theory. In practice, however, I'd like to see you try to engage them (as you put it), and have a nice, civil, productive exchange with white supremacists.
I see a lot of people here comparing Freenet with I2P and I know that these are historically tied together but I would say that it would make a lot more sense to compare Freenet with IPFS, as both are content network, while I2P is more like Tor than Freenet, an overlay transport network.
I don't know how Freenet works well so I'm not sure how it differs from IPFS, I would really like to see some kind of comparison table on how they do things.
I read the basic difference to be anonymity of the user. Which freenet protects by design but has therefore spam and DoS to deal with. Whereas IPFS doesn't have those problems, but also no privacy.
Readit News
I'm going to have to say if that's the basic motivation for censorship resistant communication in the USA, I am disappointed and sad.
Wonder if it's actually useful in places where you actually have censorship, or if it's just a nice beacon for the ISP to send the rubber hose men to visit.
Not to mention random links purporting to be terrorist manuals, normal porn, incoherent blogs and the other usual detritus.
It's sad but I think in most modern democracies that are relatively free, like the USA and EU, the primary use for these services is CSAM. There's no other reason to use it, except maybe paranoia or technical curiosity, and only the former will keep someone using it. The technically curious will move on quite quickly.
How about idealism?
I mean 20 years ago, you would have been declared paranoid, if you said secret government agencies and big corporations track everything you do online - but now you just speak a inconvinient truth, most people are aware of, but try to ignore it as much as possible.
It is good, to have working alternative plattforms, in case there are really needed by us in the west.
But yeah, currently I do not use them either, because my last experience with them were "dark", too. Because yes, the strongest incentive right now have those people not acting out of idealism, but because their content is not tolerated on the open web. Quite a shitty situation. How do one establish a "alternative, anonymous" communication service, without attracting all the kicked out elsewhere btards first?
I have been.
That’s why I deeply appreciate having a pseudonym that’s separated from where I live so I don’t have to fear Neonazis turning up at my doorstep or attacking my kids when I write something they do not like.
So instead keep using it and actually put the other content onto it yourself!
Hosting on Freenet is free and easy, you just upload a site and post it to FMS and it will be online for many years if people keep accessing it.
You don't need any server whatsoever: The machines of the other users store content which you upload (in an encrypted fashion so they cannot censor it and aren't legally culpable for it). It automatically gets replicated to more machines as it becomes more popular, thus good content stays available for a very long time and unpopular content gets garbage-collected.
So put your "money", i.e. effort, where your mouth is:
Don't just only constantly criticize FAANG for lack of privacy and censorship.
Instead, also take care of actively maintaining the spaces which provide privacy & freedom so they don't become barren.
A free public space which is only controlled by the general public needs the general public to take care of it.
There's this thing where a certain level of censorship resistance and free speech seems to yield some very horrible things. I don't even want to remark on the US law (first amendment rights, legal analysis) here, just focusing on ethics.
> A free public space which is only controlled by the general public needs the general public to take care of it.
I would remark here that the traditional system for taking care of a general space is to have a government controlling it, whether that be the council of elders, a senate, or a monarch. Fully democratic/anarchist space management is not typical of a human society. The historical outcome of fully unregulated online spaces seems to be a lot of CSAM and groupthink.
anyway. freenet is technically interesting, legally dodgy, and, imho, an ethical trap.
This is a ridiculous position.
The network is flawed. It's not hard to provide anonymity and yet still be able to remove child pornography.
Stop being an apologist for a network that delivers child pornography. Absolutely nothing makes this unfixable except the creators' dedication to making false ethical arguments.
“Make the place I like better by being there!”
Nah. Make the place you like better, then people will want to be there.
Do you remember the early internet? The Internet before JavaScript, ads, and commercialization was everywhere? Do you remember surfing through homemade webpages that someone put a lot of thought and effort into? Do you remember usenet? Do you remember not even imagining that some corporation or government was collecting your data in-bulk?
That's Freenet. It's the internet that should have been.
I came for the memes and I stayed for the community. FMS and WoT (Freenet Message System and Web of Trust) use trust lists to decide what I see and most people who use FMS and Sone (sort of like Twitter) are decent. Pedo's and generally bad people typically use Frost-Next, a third party application that the Freenet Project does not endorse that is susceptible to spam. I have had so many in-depth, thought-provoking discussions on FMS over the years. Far more than any other clearnet website today, Reddit included. There is a real sense of community on Freenet you'll be hard pressed to find elsewhere.
I enjoy making websites and writing. Freenet hosts numerous websites (freesites) I have made over the years and a ton of my political and philosophical writings. I just finished making a Super Mario 64 Freesite in honor of one of my favorite video games. I spent a lot of time working on it and I'm proud of it. That's just for Freenet. I live in the United States too, and this is what I use Freenet for. I also host the Astronomy Picture Of the Day freesite I update everyday. You don't have to need censorship resistance to use Freenet, it's existence merely safeguards the prerequisite to all real civil liberties in the digital age-- privacy. I am convinced that the existence of Freenet and tools like it (especially Tor) are necessary for a free society to exist.
I2P is great too and I'm just as passionate about that, though it's been awhile since my servers have been up. Same philosophy of censorship resistance, but with I2P you have to run a server 24/7 to host content and can have dynamic content as well. Freenet is more distributed. I2P is like Tor but is more used by nerds than criminals. Both I2P and Freenet are amazing tools. I highly recommend people to check them out.
Censorship shouldnt be the central focus. The real hope is that from 1000 ranking algorithms, we can find one that isn't a divisiveness amplifier
Along with pseudonymity that prevents people from pressuring you into voting as they wish.
It's not like we're immune to this in the west, didn't you see the censorship on all the social media recently?
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P2P was mostly about piracy. NNTP was used before that. BBS's were before that. And what comes next? IPFS?
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I recommend FMS the freenet messaging system which uses web of trust successfully to moderate messages in a Usenet forum.
What I don't understand is the word “exposed”. Let's take Mein Kampf, for example. I am sure have hit upon it on the internet multiple times over the years. I am sure anyone can find its text in no time, even if their native country banned it. Still it never occurred to me to start reading it. It would really be a joke, and I have nearly endless list of better things to read. I guess I was “exposed” to Mein Kampf, so what?
It's incredibly slow (think Tor over Tor over Tor), and needs to be run for 1-2 weeks to even work mildly. Tails would not be an ideal choice, a dedicated space is necessary.
There's no real reason to use Tor to connect to Freenet anyway, as it's encrypted in a way that the network traffic cannot be known nor even the content on your machine by yourself unless you know the private key which serves as a link to the content you are trying to locate, and it eventually will sync up those keys with your local storage. You don't even know the public key of the content that is stored in this local cache.
If you've seen Silicon Valley, this is the idea that likely founded "the Platform" concept, but they add a bit of magic and speed to the concept for the show. When your content is published, it's published "everywhere and nowhere". If you publish something, then destroy your node, that content will stay in many nodes and still be accessible. This information gets kept or cleared out based on how often it is being queried.
The content of those sites is whatever their authors want it to be :)
Further, dynamic applications such as forums are also available. Here's a list of apps built on top of Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects
Freenet needs UDP so it likely won't work on Tails as Tails tunnels everything through Tor - which does not support UDP AFAIK.
Anyone knows a way using these overlay networks, tor, i2p, freenet, to expose a service on a machine behind a NAT to be accessed through the internet without the need of clients needing special software?
[0] https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html
(Well you can, but you shouldn't want to, will explain below.)
Freenet is a datastore: It addresses content, not computers.
So a Freenet address points to a file or a directory of files (a zip). The addresses can be versioned so files/dirs can be updated.
A file/dir may be stored anywhere in Freenet. Where it is stored is not known - the machines which store it are anonymous so censorship is prevented. If many people request a file, it will get stored on more machines automatically.
Now of course you can make a specific computer constantly publish new versions of a file to "send" data like on IP and poll for a remote file to receive data. This can emulate direct connections and does work.
But it invalidates the whole point of Freenet:
Freenet wants to be censorship-resistant, so content should not rely on a single computer to keep existing because that is a single point of failure.
- use a VPN from a net-neutral ISP to obtain a real public IP address over VPN (5-10€/mo)
- route specific ports to your own machine from an internet-facing server (via SSH/Wireguard/VPN tunnels) ; unfortunately it makes it impossible for different people (backend servers) to share a single routable port
- reverse proxy specific protocols to a backend server, using for example TLS SNI (or eSNI) headers ; a single internet-facing server can serve many different vhosts to separate backends, where TLS encryption is terminated on the backend
But of course you can run tor/i2p and other crypto-secure routing protocols (yggdrasil, zeronet, cjdns...) to expand the ways to reach your server. I'm unaware of good protocol-agnostic address discovery... for tor we usually do TOFU over DNS (eg. onionMX records) or HTTPS (HTTP2 Alt-SVC headers). The GNU Name System, at least on paper, sounds like the perfect crypto-secure naming scheme that could securely bootstrap addresses from names, but i don't think it has broad adoption yet.
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And even if law enforcement could successfully convince a court that you're doing something illegal by hosting data which you cannot look into:
They couldn't first acquire the necessary search warrant because they couldn't prove that you are the one who is hosting the particular piece of illegal data: Freenet's routing algorithm is anonymized, both the people who retrieve data and the people who store it are anonymous. (Disclaimer: The security of the anonymization depends on how you've configured Freenet. In the less secure modes a well-funded attacker can de-anonymize you.)
So if law enforcement knows a certain file is evil then they cannot easily find out the IP addresses of the people who store it, and the people who store it don't know that they are doing so.
Hence it is censorship-resistant :)
You do NOT want your defense in court to rest on convincing a judge or jury of this.
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But how will they read it if even you can't?
Dead Comment
You're only going to have a few encrypted chunks of a given file in your datastore, you don't know what the file chunks are when put together or the key used to decrypt it. Information is neutral on Freenet. You would NOT get in trouble just for running a Freenet node in any sane/ free country in the world. If you go out of your way to use Freenet for something illegal, that's another matter entirely.
If you're paranoid, just use a VPN or install it to a VPS and SSH into it.
Dead Comment
Upd: found this: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet.
-- i2p was originally a fork of freenet
-- Freenet was designed and conceived as a datastore, fist and foremost, whereas i2p using 'garlic routing' was apt for any IP protocol proxied over it (a bit like tor)
-- Freenet therefore is more efficient and distributing popular data
-- There are some concerns about the algoirthms behind freenet's anonymity, which i2p claims [1] are troublesome.
-- Incidentally, I have heard complaints about the crypto behind i2p, but I am not expert in this area enough to comment. My understanding is that the consensus is that "tor r is better", but note you can e.g. run freenet over tor if desired.
I played with both as a curious teenager around the time they were released. I am now largely terrified to, because of the prospect of accidentally finding CSAM, which I suspect is very high on both platforms.
[1] https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet
Chilling effects in a nutshell.
Freenet is the same as it ever was. I don't think you could play around on there and not find that stuff. Dunno what's going on on I2P these days.
[1] https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd
It's lazy to equate implementation language with performance profile.
To answer your question, better? Neither I2P nor Freenet claim to be inherently better than the other. It depends entirely on what you are using Freenet or I2P for.
I2P is like Tor but internal (it does not mainly anonymize clearnet traffic, think onionland) and it is anonymous by default. How anonymous? Theoretically as anonymous as Tor. You can use I2P for torrents and filesharing, pretty fast irc, etc. To host an eepsite (I2P site) you have to run a server and keep it running as long as you want the site to be up, similar to running a Tor hidden service or any server on the clearnet.
Freenet has a lot more static content (no JavaScript), reminds one of the early internet (in a good way, mostly). Hosting of freesites (Freenet sites) and files is distributed, no need to run a server to have your site up. There is no 'delete' button on Freenet either. Files/ sites are deleted when no one accesses them for a time. Popular content stays forever. Sites under 2MB in size typically stay forever. Freenet is not anonymous by default, you need to know people IRL who use it to create a friend-to-friend darknet for it to be anonymous. I use mine with a VPN.
Both networks are great, lots of cool people use them. I use FMS a lot (Freenet Message System, similar to Usenet) and Sone. When I use I2P I usually host a few eepsites and hang around Irc2p (I2P's irc). I recommend installing and using both. They're both great.
Also, Tor hidden services are somewhat close: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor.
wget 'http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/freenet/fred-releases/build014...' -O new_installer_offline.jar;
java -jar new_installer_offline.jar
If you want Freenet on a server:
java -jar new_installer_offline.jar -console
Point in case: On Freenet it does. But I had to close down my youtube comments on my channel completely when they discovered my youtube-Account. Because it’s the clearnet where moderation sucks.
Its actually scaling, fully decentralized moderation system is how Freenet keeps communication friendly with actual pseudonymity and privacy protection: https://www.draketo.de/english/freenet/friendly-communicatio...
If the question is WHO to censor, I've always thought the solution is not at the server side but on the client side. Any platform where sensitive topics are being discussed (conspiracies for example) is going to be spammed, trolled, forum slided, etc. The solution is to have filtering on the client side take away the spam. Similar to how you have ad lists which block adsense, googleanalytics, etc. Allow ALL speech, and then filter out just the ones you want. Much better than having a tyrannical government or corrupt media or powerful tech giants do it for me.
I don't know how Freenet works well so I'm not sure how it differs from IPFS, I would really like to see some kind of comparison table on how they do things.