sanity

How does someone "steal" the name of their own project?

It's clearly an effective label, otherwise it wouldn't be so widely used.

The real objection is that supporters of the ideology dislike the characterization embedded in the term.

Most people don't know the academic umbrella term, but if you ask for examples of "woke", it's usually pretty obvious they're referring to Critical Social Justice ideology and its associated norms.

People can argue about the boundaries of the term, but pretending nobody knows what is being referred to is not a serious argument.

"Woke" refers to Critical Social Justice ideology, hope that helps.

I'm not sure what you mean, Freenet is at least as decentralized as bittorrent.

The two systems aren't that different in this regard, both replicate data along request paths.

In both systems data will tend to cluster on peers close to the data's location because otherwise requests couldn't find it.

The main difference is that in the new Freenet the content can be updated, with updates propagating through peers hosting the content.

I win this argument, and you lose.

lol

What is the issue? Please be specific.

And? The new Freenet provides a menu of options for anonymity which is strictly better than imposing the same (imperfect) anonymity solution on everyone.

If you have a point to make you should make it.

First, thank you for creating this project.

You're welcome :)

My question is whether freenet is designed to be resistant for active adversaries with deep packet inspection capability, particularly like the Chinese firewall that is also observed to do statistical timing analysis of packets? Is there any possibility to apply obfuscation to the peer to peer connection?

Freenet's transport protocol is a custom encrypted protocol over UDP, but it is not currently designed to evade sophisticated deep packet inspection or timing analysis by state-level adversaries like the Great Firewall.

That said, the transport layer is modular, and we would absolutely accept contributions adding traffic obfuscation or pluggable transports, subject to the usual tradeoffs around latency, bandwidth overhead, and resource usage.

And is there any mechanism to aid peer discovery (DHT?)

Freenet uses a distributed small-world routing topology for peer discovery and efficient message propagation. It isn't a conventional Kademlia-style DHT, but conceptually it serves a similar purpose.

The network is designed to self-organize into a small-world topology.[1]

[1] See the "Distance" graph at the bottom-right of the circle visualization - http://nova.locut.us:3133/

It refers to Critical Social Justice ideology. There are entire books, academic papers, and debates about it from across the political spectrum.

Fair enough, I misremembered the timeline. My broader point was about identitarianism and ideological conformity, regardless of what terminology I used at the time.

Gnutella was decentralized like Freenet, but it's broadcast search approach limited scalability relative to Freenet's "small-world" approach which can scale indefinitely.

Appreciate the suggestion. It's often difficult to know where to start when explaining a project like this.

The freenet-git work is quite recent but we do feature River, our group chat app, fairly prominently on our installation page[1] so that people can quickly try out something useful. River is by-far the most fully developed app so far.

[1] https://freenet.org/quickstart/

Why would I answer that when you already said one statement being wrong doesn't matter?

I never said that.

The fact that evidence is not provided, if anything, is an indication of potential wrong doing.

No, that's not how evidence works.

You're starting from the assumption of wrongdoing and then treating the lack of evidence as confirmation of your suspicion.

Meanwhile we've spent the last 5 years publicly building a working decentralized platform.

Apparently you follow him a lot more closely than I do, nonetheless I stand by my point even if I might use different words today.

And yet I still haven't seen anyone explain how the goals actually differ.

Interestingly, there seems to be very little overlap between the people giving substantive technical feedback and the people most upset about a 3-year-old naming controversy.

It isn't "natural" to make baseless accusations based on zero evidence.

The personal insults really lend credibility to your argument.

I didn't bring in anything, someone dug up and linked to 3-year-old out of context posts to a mailing list - I explained the context.

Someone digs up obscure 3-year-old posts to a defunct mailing list and suddenly I'm a "culture war crusader" sigh

If we're doing archaeology, my original 1999 paper was called "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System".

Though reusing the name for an entirely different project with a different codebase is disingenuous to say the least.

Same project, same goals, and it's not even the first time we started with a fresh codebase - we did it in 2008.

That won't do his reputation any good, especially in a field where reputation matters.

This drama never comes up anywhere except HN where it seems to be the obsession of a small number of vocal people who never have anything to say about the substance of the project. I don't lose any sleep over it.

the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information.

As you can with the new Freenet, you just get a menu of options instead of being forced to use a one-size-fits-all approach to anonymity.

The question was "How are the goals different?"

A question you haven't answered.

Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance.

Primarily through the same core mechanism as the original Freenet design: decentralization and relaying requests through multiple peers such that no individual peer sees the entire request path.

The new design also supports pluggable anonymity systems such as mixnets and onion routing. In some respects these are stronger than Hyphanet's approach because relay selection can be chosen intentionally by the user's node rather than emerging implicitly from network topology.

The main architectural change is that anonymity is no longer treated as a single mandatory mechanism baked into every layer of the system. Different applications can make different tradeoffs depending on their requirements.

What are the current limitation of this system? Slow bootstrapping, high latency, large disk usage?

I'd say not working on mobile is probably the main one right now. Peers bootstrap into the network in seconds typically, and contract updates typically arrive at subscribed peers in under 2 seconds which was the design goal. The Freenet binary is just 10MB, and disk usage is fairly minimal as even the largest contracts are < a few MB.

Is there a solution, or ideas, for DNS equivalents? I know the I2P approach (and remember that GNUNet had some unique approach as well), which can be workable in practice with "trusted registrars" as jump hosts. Name resolution feel even more important to solve in decentralized web.

Contracts in Freenet are identified by a hash of the contract webassembly + contract parameters - so the contract's identity is tied to its function. This is effectively a generalization of Freenet's "Signed-Subspace Keys" - which were also adopted by GNUnet.

How can anonymity be built on top of this system?

Most likely through a mixnet or onion routing built on Freenet's contracts and delegates. If you don't mind listening to videos this was discussed in depth on a recent Freenet podcast[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/sfdsljrnJiI?si=tTs2qNglrYJOImn2

How was that "wrong, harmful, or dishonest" - specifically?