Yeah, I&#x27;m not a fan.
Feels like this project is trying to get popular off of Freenet&#x27;s name recognition rather than its own merits.

&gt; and after over a year of debateThere was no &quot;year of debate&quot;.You came to the mailing list and announced it for the first time as a finalized decision already,without any prior debate with the original team.The &quot;board&quot; you cited as the body which allegedly discussed it did neither join the mailing list discussion,nor were you willing to hand out their contact info.It&#x27;s all public for anyone to see on the mailing list archive:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;msg55262.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;msg5526...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;</a>

&gt; This is a false narrative, from the Freenet FAQ[1]:I&#x27;m sorry, but nothing following that even comes close to proving that it&#x27;s a false narrative. Quite the opposite actually.

&gt; Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team&#x27;s work,This is a false narrative, from the Freenet 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.&gt; The new &quot;Freenet&quot; does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,Because the new Freenet will have a menu of anonymity options rather than committing to a one-size-fits-all approach, while also addressing the issue of illegal content[2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-and-rebranded" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#why-was-freenet-rearchitected...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-does-freenet-handle-harmful-content" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...</a>

Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for,
and freely speaking can result in all kinds of repressions.And even without agreeing on whether people should be anonymous on the Internet,it could be agreed that replacing a software which guards against a certain 
threat model (repressions) with one which does not,without changing the name, is not exactly a wise decision.

I&#x27;m very glad to hear that—the anonymity of the original Freenet has led to it being a very unsavory place that was more well known for CSAM then anything positive or useful. As an outsider, it sounds like this new direction is the right choice for Freenet to try and attract new users and fulfill the team&#x27;s original goals.

The issue is that the original name, &quot;Freenet&quot;, was repurposed for a different codebase.

So he forked the project and went his own way. I am not sure I see the issue here. This is how we do open source on the internet. You don&#x27;t have to join him, but he also has the right to go his own way too.

Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team&#x27;s work,in favor of a rewrite from different developers, without asking anyone on the original team.It was an ivory tower decision which was announced on the mailing list without prior discussion.The old team did not agree, yet it was forced through by a decision of the &quot;board&quot;.The &quot;board&quot; was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;msg55262.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;devl@freenetproject.org&#x2F;msg5526...</a>The funding of the existing, original &quot;Freenet&quot; was repurposed for the new one of course.The new &quot;Freenet&quot; does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name &quot;Hyphanet&quot; at:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hyphanet.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hyphanet.org&#x2F;</a>

&gt; For values that don&#x27;t have a natural merge function (or where you don&#x27;t want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead?Yes, in fact you can implement this within the current framework, for example with our group chat River, each room state maintains a list of the N most recent messages sorted by (approximate) timestamp.The idea is that you can adapt the merge logic to the needs of the specific application, and I think a time ordered event log will be a common pattern.

For values that don&#x27;t have a natural merge function (or where you don&#x27;t want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead? That is:- The synced value is a history of client updates, sorted in some eventually consistent order (e.g. by hybrid logical clocks). Merging takes the union of the update sets.- The user-visible value is the result of processing these updates in order, using arbitrary contract code.This is overkill for simple last-writer-wins values, but it lets you support fairly general data types &amp; arbitrary update functions, including ones that preserve application-specific invariants.The Automerge CRDT library works like this already [1][2], but it only allows specific updates to JSON data. Sharing code via your contracts solves the hard part of generalizing that to arbitrary data &amp; updates.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;automerge.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;automerge.org&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1805.04263" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1805.04263</a>

Reputation systems have been a theoretical idea for a while, but we haven&#x27;t come up with anything sybil-proof without centralized identity management. &quot;we have a menu&quot; sounds a lot like &quot;we don&#x27;t actually have any viable plan&quot; in this case.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, this is awesome. I think it is built on a subtlety bad premise. I think it is time to start build organizational nomic games on this sort of contract system, literal organization governance, for systems like this to thrive.

Ghost keys will ultimately be just one of a menu of options for bootstrapping reputation in a decentralized reputation system. They have the advantage of simplicity, anonymity, and helping to fund the project, but as you correctly point out - they are centralized.A cryptocurrency-based solution like you suggest will undoubtedly be one of a menu of reputation bootstrapping options that will develop over time.

I think better approach for &quot;ghost keys&quot; would be requiring X amount of crypto to be sent to 0x0 (burning). Current implementation (requiring donation to freenet) basically gives freenet foundation infinite reputation (including any other potential project that would accept ghost keys as identity), kinda breaking the decentralization aspect

yea, there&#x27;s a lot of scenarios it doesn&#x27;t make sense in imo. and even with processing-gas-limits it&#x27;s still kinda weird and harder to prevent abuse on (e.g. you can&#x27;t predict costs because you don&#x27;t know what requests it might send next - graphql&#x27;s declarative approach helps it here).but for e.g. mobile apps with a trusted backend? probably great. you could even just send hashes of the WASM blobs because they will often be identical (and the full blob if that fails), and some serialized data to serve as args that vary (e.g. page-size limit of the third internal request), and you&#x27;d have an absurdly flexible system with fairly small requests. I&#x27;m just not sure how small, or if it&#x27;d end up computationally worth it compared to graphql &#x2F; sparql &#x2F; etc.

Thank you, that&#x27;s actually an idea I considered a while ago - embed some wasm in a GET request (which retrieves complete contract state from the network) that could pre-process the state before returning it to the requestor.The issue was that Freenet requires that intermediate peers can cache the contract state as they&#x27;re passing it back to the requestor so in the end I decided against it, but might revisit in the future.

Neat. I&#x27;ve been wanting to see WASM-defined network behavior like this for a while (yay arbitrary consistency algorithms!), I&#x27;ll have to explore it in more detail :)(the main thing I&#x27;ve been wanting to try: rather than graphql, send a WASM blob along with your request to a server, and just run it to filter fields in the response &#x2F; pipeline requests &#x2F; define &quot;fail if any err &#x2F; pair errors with requests&quot; for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)

Looks very interesting! I stumbled across your webpage a few months ago while looking into the state of peer-to-peer. Glad to see p2p projects are still active.

Why would you want to exchange private messages with anonymous counterparties?- You participate in a secret cabal, and don&#x27;t want participants&#x27; identities be visible to each other.- You&#x27;re a journalist, and want to give your informants in sensitive matters, or from oppressed countries, a way to securely interact with you, so that you won&#x27;t be technically capable of reporting their identities.- You&#x27;re selling illegal goods or services.I&#x27;d say that in the first two cases I would consider running a separate copy of the network, because it apparently involves one supernode, and I might want to control the supernode (or maybe not).

Seems reasonable to build a cryptocurrency around this. The network could pay the cryptocurrency out to users dedicating resources. Have you thought about that?

Our intention is that Freenet will only consume surplus resources, but we plan to build a reputation system that could have a notion of &quot;karma&quot; that is earned by providing resources to the network. This karma could be used to gate access to resources, for example like a VIP chat room on River.So there are a lot of possibilities but for now users are motivated by a desire to see the network succeed, and that seems to be a sufficient motivator at our current scale.

Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.

&gt; Very cool project!Thank you!&gt; Where can I learn more about this?If you don&#x27;t mind watching a video I gave this talk back in March that should be fairly comprehensive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0?si=R4ifrsfEUJfvjDPx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0?si=R4ifrsfEUJfvjDPx</a>If you would prefer an article I recommend: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;</a>&gt; How is this different from CRDTs&#x2F;CmRDTs?It&#x27;s very closely related, you can view Freenet contract state as a CmRDT, where the details of the merge operation are specified in the webassembly contract.

This is broadly correct.&gt; CvRDTs also need idempotence, so they can handle duplicate data. Either they are idempotent too (which would make it semilattice-like), or the network protocol handles the deduplication outside of the data itself.Freenet&#x27;s summary&#x2F;delta synchronization mechanism implicitly disregards duplicate updates. The idea is that a peer A creates a &quot;summary&quot; of a contract&#x27;s state which is sent to the other peer B which then creates a &quot;delta&quot;, which contains anything in B&#x27;s state that isn&#x27;t in A&#x27;s state. The delta is then sent from B to A bringing A&#x27;s state up-to-date. Thus the contract defines a custom synchronization mechanism for its state which can be very efficient.These summaries and deltas are just arbitrary bytes as far as the framework is concerned, their meaning is entirely up to the contract.&gt; The other bit Freenet has added is doing all this with DHT routing and subscriptions, rather than a more basic peer mesh. This is very different to a blockchain and means it probably isn&#x27;t suited for anything transactional.That&#x27;s correct, Freenet doesn&#x27;t guarantee a global consensus although in practice contract states will converge within a few seconds. This is good enough for applications like group chat and social networks but for a cryptocurrency you still need to solve the double-spend and global ordering problems.

It looks a lot like a CvRDT (i.e. a state-based CRDT).They describe it as a commutative monoid, which means it has associativity and commutativity. CvRDTs also need idempotence, so they can handle duplicate data. Either they are idempotent too (which would make it semilattice-like), or the network protocol handles the deduplication outside of the data itself.Letting the payload&#x2F;application define the merge operation is clever. I assume it would mean contracts could opt in to idempotency if it doesn&#x27;t already exist.The other bit Freenet has added is doing all this with DHT routing and subscriptions, rather than a more basic peer mesh. This is very different to a blockchain and means it probably isn&#x27;t suited for anything transactional.

tombstones are sorta the default answer here (i.e. at simplest, you keep all data forever so you can merge correctly, but you hide anything where you&#x27;ve seen a tombstone after it).but &quot;makes sense&quot; and ways to optimize that can change massively with context. e.g. for a chat app, as soon as you see &quot;deleted message X&quot;, you can reasonably drop X and all past and future changes to X because they won&#x27;t be shown by anyone (don&#x27;t even need to sync them). if you do that with &quot;deleted chars 87..93&quot; in a text editor, past-edits that you receive in the future might affect the behavior (it might add chars before those, changing what that range means), so you can&#x27;t simply forget those chars (e.g. an easy option is to replay all events that occur after an event syncs, but that means retaining all events forever). the semantics you choose and what you do with the data affect your outcomes a lot.tbh this is one of the reasons I like the idea of a WASM-defined algorithm. no one algorithm will be &quot;best&quot; for all data, and the storage&#x2F;computation&#x2F;transmission savings can be extreme.

For a basic CRDT set, merge rules have to have some kind of temporality basis in the messages such that commutativity is preserved. usually it&#x27;s a timestamp, sometimes it&#x27;s an unforgeable value like a hash, e.g.
A: { &quot;prev_hash&quot;: null, &quot;content&quot;: &quot;foobar&quot; }
B: { &quot;prev_hash&quot;: &quot;&lt;hash of A&gt;&quot;, &quot;content&quot;: &quot;foobarbaz&quot; }
C: { &quot;prev_hash&quot;: &quot;&lt;hash of B&gt;&quot;, &quot;content&quot;: &quot;foobaz&quot; }and when played out of order, it&#x27;s guaranteed to resolve to foobaz eventually or immediately, depending on when messages are receivedwhen you encounter the scenario of a fork, there&#x27;s usually a fork resolution rule, e.g.
D: { &quot;prev_hash&quot;: &quot;&lt;hash of B&gt;&quot;, &quot;content&quot;: &quot;foobazbar&quot; }to resolve C vs D, sort lexicographically, choose direction of sort order and pick firstWhen you have non-continuous data due to messages dropping, e.g. you have B and perhaps an E that builds on C, you can either use the same lexicographic rule, or make the hash basis a combination of timestamp and hash, so you get temporality and lineage.As for deletes, you have either the single set approach of simply making the message content empty and that _is_ the delete, or you have the 2-phase sets, where there exists an add set and a delete set.Quite a few ways to approach it, but commutativity can be readily preserved.

It depends on the nature of the data, for example in our group chat app River[1] it stores the most recent messages - deleting the oldest to make room for the newest as necessary. Banning a user will remove them from the members list along with their messages, and recently banned users are stored in a banned list (like a tombstone).So there is no one approach to this, rather you design the approach based on the application, and since contracts are just webassembly they are extremely flexible.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river</a>

I&#x27;m also curious about this. I don&#x27;t understand how deletion and modification can be made commutative operations in a way that makes sense

Very cool project!&gt; We&#x27;ve developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a &quot;merge&quot; operation for the contract&#x27;s associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you&#x27;ll get the same end result.Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs&#x2F;CmRDTs?

Looks very intersting, congratulations for the launch and wishing you good Luck!

There&#x27;s also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;internetcomputer.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;internetcomputer.org&#x2F;</a>

This is cool!OK, time for inception... 9social on freenet-git¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ &#x2F; ¯

Interesting, we&#x27;ve also experimented with hosting git repos on Freenet, see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;freenet-git" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;freenet-git</a>

I definitely think we should be exploring decentralized approaches to services we use.I also would like to see an emphasis on local-first approaches.This experiment, in the spirit of UNIX, composes git and text files to form a social network:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dharmatech&#x2F;9social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dharmatech&#x2F;9social</a>Video demo:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;q6qVnlCjcAI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;q6qVnlCjcAI</a>

Thank you!&gt; I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?While I realize this is wildly ambitious, my goal is that Freenet could ultimately replace the world wide web and the client-server architecture more generally which I view as inherently concentrating power in the hands of a few (which it has done).

Very interesting. I have been working on something quite some time, where something like this would play a very crucial role, but i never got around to really thinking about how to implement everything. And as I have still a lot of work to do on my project, that would utilize something like freenet, i am very eager to dive into your work. Just wanted to write this as some form as appreciation for your work.I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?Great work it seems, so far. I will yet have to really look through it all. Congratulations on this.

Not currently, but installation is very quick - the binary itself is just 10MB.I am thinking about making a public proxy available so people can try the network itself without installing it, but we&#x27;ve made installation as quick and painless as possible.

Is there any way to run this in the browser rather than downloading an app?

This is awesome. I rotated some ideas like this in my head a while ago but never had the motivation to put it together. Happy to see more types of protocols like this.

That project had nothing to do with the freenet that ran after 2006 either. It&#x27;s not the first ground up rewrite with major breaking changes using the same name.

Not sure how you can say it&#x27;s unrelated given that it was created for the same purpose by the same person with many design similarities.

Unfortunately, this is an effectively unrelated project.

I wrote a short University essay on Freenet in 1998 I think it was... I may still have the document somewhere. Good stuff, very pioneer!

I wrote a web browser for Freenet called Snarfzilla. I guess it may have been the first web browser for &quot;the dark web&quot;. [1]I integrated &quot;Fair Tunes&quot;, which tried to pay musicians for mp3 files, long before any label was selling mp3&#x27;s.(Edit: I just remembered Freshmeat automatically rejecting Snarfzilla because they were so sick of projects ending in *zilla. The owner thought it was cool and added it after I emailed. No idea why I used &#x27;snarf&#x27;. I&#x27;ve never said it out loud.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;snarfzilla&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;snarfzilla&#x2F;</a>

But not a problem in theory for Android and Ubuntu Touch systems?

In principle but we don&#x27;t yet support mobile except experimentally, in part due to mobile OS restrictions (eg. iOS apps can&#x27;t embed webassembly).

Can this be used to sync the data of an app from mobile to desktop without a server ? And vice-versa.

Imagine an internet that is fundamentally decentralized, where your online presence isn&#x27;t at the mercy of a company like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.Think of it as going back to the Internet&#x27;s decentralized roots.

ELI5, how is this different than the internet?

Big fan of this project. Three years ago, I interviewed Ian Clarke about his upcoming Freenet rewrite. He&#x27;s the original &quot;OG&quot; of decentralized content networks. We go into detail regarding its architecture on the podcast:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ</a>

&gt; Or to put it very bluntly: what is this, why should I care, and why not just use the old one?If you don&#x27;t mind I&#x27;ll quote the FAQ[1]:The previous and current versions of Freenet have several key differences:Functionality: The previous version was analogous to a decentralized hard drive, while the current version is analogous to a full decentralized computer.Real-time Interaction: The current version allows users to subscribe to data and be notified immediately if it changes. This is essential for systems like instant messaging or group chat.Programming Language: Unlike the previous version, which was developed in Java, the current Freenet is implemented in Rust. This allows for better efficiency and integration into a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, MacOS, etc).Transparency: The current version is a drop-in replacement for the world wide web and is just as easy to use.Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.&gt; Which then led to people storing Bad Stuff, and this is somehow addressed in the new version? (I also read some stuff about friends and trust in the previous one, but haven&#x27;t looked into properly.)The new version doesn&#x27;t claim to provide anonymity as part of the platform itself although anonymity systems can be built on top of it. I&#x27;d also refer you to this FAQ [2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-do-the-previous-and-current-versions-of-freenet-differ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-do-the-previous-and-curre...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-does-freenet-handle-harmful-content" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;faq&#x2F;#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...</a>

Can you tell me about the old Freenet? I&#x27;ve read up on Wikipedia and it seems to be very much in the line with the 90s&#x2F;2000s p2p file sharing software. Except that you can store stuff on other people&#x27;s computers and it&#x27;s encrypted?Which then led to people storing Bad Stuff, and this is somehow addressed in the new version? (I also read some stuff about friends and trust in the previous one, but haven&#x27;t looked into properly.)I think understanding the old one and the issues it ran into would be helpful for understanding the context, and the motivations for the changes.Or to put it very bluntly: what is this, why should I care, and why not just use the old one?Thanks

Yes in the sense that users pool resources for the network, but no in the sense that Napster relied on a centralized database of content - whereas Freenet is entirely decentralized.Also Freenet is much more general, you could think of Napster like a shared hard drive, whereas Freenet is like a shared computer capable of running decentralized applications like group chat, social networks, search engines, etc.

Is this similar to how Napster worked?

Thank you!If you&#x27;re in a position to support the project financially you&#x27;re more than welcome to donate[1], we&#x27;re a 501c3 non-profit and all funds go to support development.If you&#x27;re a developer and are interested in building on Freenet I suggest starting with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;build&#x2F;manual&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;build&#x2F;manual&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;</a>, you can also join our Matrix room[2], or install Freenet[3] and chat with us on River[3], our decentralized group chat.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.to&#x2F;#&#x2F;#freenet-locutus:matrix.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.to&#x2F;#&#x2F;#freenet-locutus:matrix.org</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;</a>

In my early days of technology tinkering when I was young I was always interested in security, and one day I stumbled upon freenet, and my world changed.It was amazing and led me to get far more acquainted with the cyberpunk scene. It was this alternative separate internet from what the rest of the world saw with all of the good and bad that brought.I&#x27;ve been meaning to set it up again and get back into it. I will say for everyone pining for the Internet of yesteryear freenet is it. Go and explore it it is everything the 90&#x27;s Internet was like, super slow, crazy unhinged nerds all over the place random collections of links, crazy.Thanks for all you&#x27;ve done IanEdit:
Btw what is the best way to support the project and get involved?

See also:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40469711">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40469711</a> - Ian Clarke explains the next generation of Freenet [video] (2023)

We had too much Gnutella. I am in search for a locus to us. Now. SCNR

For the past 5 years or so I&#x27;ve been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search&#x2F;recommendation engine.Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka &quot;state&quot;) are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.We&#x27;ve developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a &quot;merge&quot; operation for the contract&#x27;s associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you&#x27;ll get the same end result.This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.If you&#x27;d like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you&#x27;re also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;faq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;faq&#x2F;</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0</a>

Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

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I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what I should do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was literally the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. Same exact AI response again.I worked as a developer in a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with the question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn&#x27;t even read the AI&#x27;s answer. He just screenshots and forwards it.Recently someone sent me a DM on Reddit about my post. I replied. He wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.I&#x27;m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI&#x27;s answer.

Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers

Hey HN, We&#x27;re Gus and Carlos from Runtime (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;runtm.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;runtm.com</a>). We&#x27;re building infra that lets your whole team (including non-engineers) ship with Claude Code, Codex, and other agents without engineering having to handhold every session.After Mentum (YC S21) was acquired, I personally shipped 4 full-stack products in 3 months using coding agents. When I tried to roll the same workflow out to the rest of the team, it fell apart: Most PRs were unmergeable slop - Every repo required an engineer doing one-off local setup. - Skills and context lived in one person&#x27;s head. - There was no safe way for a PM to touch a real codebase without risking a bad deploy or a secrets leak.Carlos comes from building agentic reconciliation systems at Modern Treasury and had a similar experience when letting his support team use devin.We ended up building internal background agent infra but it quickly became a nightmare to mantain and develop. We built Runtime so you don&#x27;t have to do this kind of thing.Runtime work like as follows. Engineering defines the context once: system instructions, skills, and scoped integrations installable via CLI, mise, npm, or any package manager. Then Runtime snapshots your full running environment including multi-service Docker Compose setups, Kafka, Redis, seeded DBs, so it comes up in milliseconds with every server already running.We orchestrate across sandbox providers like E2B, Daytona, EC2 or self-hosted K8s depending on your setup. Secrets are injected through our managed proxy so they never touch the agent directly, and guardrails run at the infrastructure level: command allow&#x2F;deny lists, network egress controls, and RBAC scoped per human and per agent. Every session also gets a shareable preview URL, so internal builds go from sandbox to the rest of the team without needing production access.Runtime works with whichever agent your team already uses: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini, Devin. You can trigger sandboxes from our web app, CLI, Slack, Linear, GitHub, or API.One of our customers built an on-call inspector that wires PagerDuty, Sentry, and their repo so when an alert fires, the agent finds the cause and opens a PR with a unit test before anyone gets paged. Another runs a finance agent in a private Slack channel pulling from Stripe, NetSuite, and Snowflake to run reconciliations in minutes with source rows attached.A fintech unicorn and several YC scaleups are live on Runtime, including a few teams who had built similar infrastructure internally and handed it to us to take over.The core is open source at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runtm-ai&#x2F;runtm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runtm-ai&#x2F;runtm</a>. Hosted version is live at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.runtm.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.runtm.com</a>, free tier included. We&#x27;re charging a flat platform fee plus compute, no token markup.Check our demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wLwj__aEEh4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wLwj__aEEh4</a>We&#x27;d love to hear how you&#x27;re thinking about the infra for letting more people across your org use coding agents without creating chaos!