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/recommendation engine.
Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.
We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'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'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're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].
[1] https://github.com/freenet/river
[2] https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/
Please explain how "the new freenet" tackles censorship resistance.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001017133926/http://freenetpro... "Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship."
https://web.archive.org/web/20050201110519/http://freenetpro... "Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150206152355/https://freenetpr... "Share files, chat on forums, browse and publish, anonymously and without fear of blocking or censorship!"
today: "Hyphanet is peer-to-peer network for censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting publishing and communication."
the new freenet: ?!?
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.
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? And is there any mechanism to aide peer discovery (DHT?)
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/
That property was useful both for improving availability AND censorship resistance: you could not attempt to "locate" where the blocks are without spreading them.
My naive understanding of the new design is that you can have contracts that are replicated... but they still cluster around the same place in the keyspace so any capable active adversary can actively deny access to content trivially. Did I misunderstand something here?
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.
Even now when people in the US are organising against a fascist regime it's mostly WhatsApp and maybe Signal.
Example publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485651880663...
> What are the content patterns on Freenet? Four patterns were identified. Freenet is (1) an archive of deviant data resistant to censorship (2) a space dominated by content associated with masculinity, (3) a nonmarket space where commercial exchange is non-existent, and (4) an empty space with many requests not returning information, and many flogs abandoned. We asked a third question: How does the analysis of Freenet inform current understandings of hacker culture? Freenet, we suggest, can be understood as a type of digital “wilderness”. It is a singular darknet space, supporting a distinct set of hacker practices
Practically: people in Hyphanet blog about stuff they dare not blog about in the clearnet -- anything from radical politics (from all kinds, left, right, libertarian, …) over personal opinion pages to wilder stuff like magick (yes, in that spelling).
Not to forget the Russian Poet who’s posting daily poems with the goal (as he wrote) that those poems still survive after police knocked at his door.
(besides talk about hyphanet and privacy tech)
So yes: I don’t understand the downvotes either, because it’s a legitimate question with a pretty clear answer: yes.
You're moving the debate here. The question was "How are the goals different?" from the project leader (who ought to know better), not whether moving them makes sense.
Others could argue that software nobody uses for its stated purpose has failed; but you are right that is technically a different discussion than the one you started.
A question you haven't answered.
It was slower than Kazaa/bittorrent, but it was far harder to work out who was shareing what. (if memory serves it also chunked files up so they weren;t on the same machine, but that could be me misremembering)
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.
It would surprise me if this would not be a common interpretation of these texts alone among the readers here.
As for the general reputation of the OG Freenet in this lineage, to the extent I'm aware, anonymity was pretty much the defining characteristic. More or less everything else in the user experience suffered to some extent compared to other chat and file sharing services because of this "focus".
2. It should provide anonymity to b oth providers and consumers of informa-
tionPerhaps.
Though reusing the name for an entirely different project with a different codebase is disingenuous to say the least.
That won't do his reputation any good, especially in a field where reputation matters.
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.
Many on here beg to 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.
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.
> The new "Freenet" 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] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected...
[2] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...
There was no "year of debate".
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 "board" 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's all public for anyone to see on the mailing list archive:
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
- https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5534...
- https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5534...
Gee, I can't imagine how that mailing list could ever be toxic.
Identitarianism is a cancer, that has been fed via social media algorithms. We seem to have invented a machine for rewarding all of the wrong incentives. Who would have thought that phenomena like audience capture & polarised thought bubbles would be in the palm of the hand, directing thoughts and forming unbreakable opinions on an array of issues that otherwise wouldn't even be on the radar?
I don't think that this is a left, right or in between thing. Identitarianism had infected the entire political spectrum.
BTW: Perhaps I'm wrong but I don't take the Wikipedia definition of "identitarian movement" and identitarianism. I'm thinking entirely about identity politics. "If you're associated with person X you must be Y", or "If you believe A you must be a B". Highly policed thought bubbles. Ostracism. Cancelling.
As a result, today, with technology that can enable mass communication of thought, there are important conversations that can no longer happen in society.
Unfortunately with that perspective, I end in in the same camp as unabashed bigots and real Nazis.
But here's the problem. This whole phenomenon is most prevalent in western style democracy. You cannot take that person's vote. You can engage with them and try to change their mind (but also be open to having your own mind changed too, otherwise it's a disingenuous enterprise). Or you can eject block and cancel. If anything, that just drives them further from your social/political group. Hence the person who you blocked and cancelled starts to look around at the other "so called evil people" outside the bubble, and realise that many of them might be refugees from pleasantville , just like you. You can only see your former bubble after your pushed or pulled out of it.
Bubbles can suck people in, but they can also push people out into the gravitational pull of other bubbles.
* You made the mailing list post on 22 Jan 2023.
* Elon Musk first used the phrase (on Twitter, at least) on 19 Dec 2021. [0]
* As of May 2022 at the latest, he was regularly using it in tweets, including ones with tens and hundreds of thousands of likes. [1][2][3]
* By the end of 2022, "woke mind virus" was well-known enough that other users were cracking jokes about it. [4][5]
[0] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1472371245744373760#m
[1] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1516600269899026432#m
[2] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1526975113597489154#m
[3] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1527356085090545664#m
[4] https://xcancel.com/ditzkoff/status/1602283284947427329#m
[5] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/160521361079977984...
Edit: do they all like the letter X, too? I think in this list it's just a coincidence, but maybe?
Edit because I can't post a new comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608061
Some of the things you say in these threads might be "right" but I can assure you that many of them are not effective, which is counterproductive to the goal you are trying to achieve.
A culture where people are expected to constantly self-censor to avoid bad-faith interpretations is unhealthy and corrosive.
Just because you have a belief about something doesn't make it right to always assume the worst from people and that you always have the best answer.
I tend to avoid people that don't come from a place of good faith. And I feel that attacking people because you might be right about something is coming from a place of bad faith and isn't always the best course of action. There is a place for that, when it comes to your freedom being violated or something, but when it comes to having discussions with people, we are all human. Ego can be a determinant.
Again, as we are wondering into tumblr style debates here (ie not listening and just saying what you think they said)
There is a difference between being "right" and being "effective"
Or to put it another way: "perfect is the enemy of good"
However I will break it down a bit more. You agree with me that there is such thing as a horizon of "acceptable opinion" for people? Some have larger windows, some much narrower.
If we agree on that, I would ask, what happens if someone goes in hard (rhetorically) with a viewpoint that is outside of "acceptable opinion"? You begin to discount their opinion, regardless of evidence. Or it requires a much high bar to accept _any_ opinion from that person.
Which leads back to the original point, you may be correct, but you are unable to persuade anyone else that you are correct, because you are not speaking the same language and gently pulling them to your viewpoint.
Hence the "you can be right, or you can be effective"
I think it’s a category error and an ad hominem attack to bring it up in a debate with someone. It doesn’t mean your wrong or can’t still beleive they were virtue signaling, if that’s what you mean by standing by what you said, but more than one thing can be true and that being your reaction is not honest engagement with the criticism… I don’t care think it’s about the joke very much, it’s not especially funny but not all humor has to be, and I don’t love their reaction to it either, but I think you’re confusing the feedback you’re getting here and there and probably elsewhere that your opinions should change… a sibling comment spoke of being right vs effective, and there’s something to that, but there’s also being right vs having a growth mindset, about being open to genuine conflict that sometimes brings new perspective or insight… But that doesn’t happen when one side shuts down the other with ad hominem attacks or uncharitable assumptions. To be fair, it doesn’t happen online in mailing lists or discussion forums at all very often. Maybe you only get these kinds of reactions here and when people seem more real to you in person you engage differently… I know most people engage differently online than in person, and different pseudonymously than using real names. Someone else here compared you to Linus, and there’s probably something there? There’s no doubt you brought some vision and insight to both these projects, as he did, but something changed for him some years back that was a growth moment and caused him new perspective on how he engaged with people online. The same could still happen for you, and it wouldn’t mean you were giving in to a “woke mind virus”, it would mean you were growing.
I was in the midst of obviously baseless allegations being made against me, not because of anything I actually said but because some very nasty[1] people disagreed with a naming decision I had made.
If you ever find yourself in that situation you are way past the principle of charity.
I'm not saying I couldn't have handled it more gracefully and probably would today, remember this was an obscure mailing list post from 3 years ago that someone dug up.
[1] This is not to suggest that everyone who disagreed with my decision behaved badly, it was a small minority
This is grim.
If you stand by it I'd say good.... luck, yeah, good luck, you're singlehandedly the gravest enemy of the project.
If you think a specific statement was wrong, harmful, or dishonest, then explain why. I'll wait.
That is what is wrong with it.
> I stand by every word I said in that thread
> someone picks a specific statement
> "If the use of a single phrase... is enough to make you dismiss someone entirely"
Bro, you asked for a specific statement. Was GP actually supposed to provide N specific statements, where N is a hidden number known only to you?
I've met a lot of folks in software who think contradicting themselves in order to "gotcha" the other person is some form of being clever. You can't really have success reasoning them out of it; they think being incorrigible is the same as winning.
I never said that.
Specificity is literally gaslighting.
How does bringing in "the woke mind virus" or "virtue signaling" into a technical conversation help build your movement vs. cause people to tune out?
It's dishonest because it pretends that people behaving in a way that you don't like are somehow infected by some (literal or metaphorical) contagion, when I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case.
I'd be delighted to be proven wrong on either of the above with studies or other serious sources. I'll wait.
See the cases of:
- The Ada Initiative
- DongleGate
- James Damore
- Bret Weinstein and Evergreen state (there's even a documentary by Mike Nayna about this)
Just to name a few.
Hyperventilating over the phrase "woke mind virus" or calling Musk a nazi a few dozen more times will not work.
You're the square, and your favored ideology lost.
We now even have BlueSky serving as the verifiable echo chamber of the idiots, and it's absolutely hilarious how they just can't stop attacking each other over there.
Calling for sources while questioning one of the most visible forms of social activism of the last decade is pure gaslighting btw.
And no, asking for sources is not gaslighting, no matter how much you say it is. It’s important to me that my beliefs are backed by evidence, and so you’ll have to forgive me that I just can’t assume that “a woke mind virus is a thing that exists” is a valid claim.
@sanity posted a sibling reply which I can’t reply to because it’s [dead] for some reason. In that reply they do give a couple of examples of recent literature that they say supports their claim. I will freely admit I’m not familiar with the work they’re citing so I’m going to look into it. Upon a brief look at a summary of the Lukianoff and Haidt work, I don’t think it actually addresses the claim which I was asking for sources for, but I will reserve judgment until I read it.
A warning sign.
Look, if everyone around tells you says it sounds like a donkey, looks like a donkey and walks like a donkey, maybe check with a vet?
It's not a conspiracy and not that hard. You'd be embarrassed if you u saw what we see. And indeed, you destroyed the credibility of the project with that.
So the issue is that you're insufficiently socialized to understand this or don't care, both of which are very poor signs for someone who wants to lead a long lived organization which stewards a open global platform. IMO your behavior in this thread is very strong evidence that any org you lead is unlikely to thrive. You seem to lack the disposition and people skills.
People can argue about the boundaries of the term, but pretending nobody knows what is being referred to is not a serious argument.
The claim is that it's too broad to be useful. But as I said earlier, this is all besides the point.
The real objection is that supporters of the ideology dislike the characterization embedded in the term.
Again, besides the point.
"The woke mind virus" really? You used that non-ironically? This is not something a serious or sane person would say for real.
Dude like this asshole would be fine with us keeping drinking fountains and lunch counters segregated, because thats how we've always done things.
Remember folks, there’s no such thing as “too much perspective” and when you get it wrong you look like this silver -haired, privileged , rich as fuck bigot.
Why do you get to bypass the HN global rate limit?
And that repurposing the name would cause lots of damage.
Incorrect, I raised the issue with the lead maintainer over a year prior to that announcement.
> You came to the mailing list and declared it as a finalized decision.
As the project's architect I'm entitled to make decisions about the project's future direction.
> It's all public for anyone to see on the mailing list archive:
> https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
I stand by every word I said in that mailing list thread.
The previous lead maintainer, Steve, voiced their frustration with your decision here:
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
To which you sent a brash reply, which sounds like you don't know Steve's position in the community:
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
To which the current lead maintainer, Arne, said he agrees with the sentiment of Steve:
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
So if you discussed this with Arne for a year, then why does he agree with the frustration of Steve?
And even if the discussion with Arne happened, it still was a backroom decision:
Two people are not representative on a project with plenty of developers and an active community.
> As the project's architect I'm entitled to make decisions about the project's future direction.
A sense of entitlement is not a leadership quality.
A leadership quality would be to admit a mistake:
That repurposing the name was not only bad for the original project,
but also for the new one (because these discussions will haunt it forever),
and to then rename the new project to a fresh name which no other software used before.
Whether or not it was the right decision will be determined by the outcomes, which so far are promising, because we have a working network that does things that the old architecture could never do.
Nothing about the name change prevented existing users from continuing to use the software just as they had been doing, and many of them said they agreed with the decision.
I honestly only ever hear about this drama on HN, it's a non-issue anywhere else we get attention.
That's beside the point though. I was pointing out the hypocrisy. This sidestepping and deflection seems to be a trend with you, both here and in the mailing list.
No point in responding to me though if it's just to grandstand. You've made it apparent to me that I want nothing to do with your project. Cheers.
Good then that we haven't, in fact we set ourselves a very difficult goal and achieved it. Not that we don't still have a lot of work to do.
> You've made it apparent to me that I want nothing to do with your project. Cheers.
You seem to have nothing to say about the substance of what we're doing so I'll get over it.
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
they were saying they debated with themselves,
before making the decision.
I'm sorry, but nothing following that even comes close to proving that it's a false narrative. Quite the opposite actually.
> 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.
So in that aspect it seems more user friendly than a hard fork.
Well, that name pretty much dooms the project to a slow death in obscurity.
He has forked the project (to something that does not share the same goals so "fork" is arguable here), took the name, the cash and the goodwill.
We went from "we have enough donations/donators" to "how do we pay for the upcoming AWS bill?".
As someone who has been fairly active on the "old freenet", I have never cared about money nor funding... but I cannot help but notice that some has likely been misappropriated. Things like the SUMA award (https://web.archive.org/web/20150320201527/http://suma-award...) were awarded specifically for "protection against surveillance and censorship" that the "new freenet" does not even aim to provide.
"The board" of the non-profit seems to have been culled just before the decision. I don't know why, I wasn't on it. Maybe @agl can shime in (he was).
All I know is that this could have been handled better. It's what I wrote back then on https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5527...
How do the goals differ, specifically?
> but I cannot help but notice that some has likely been misappropriated
You had no visibility into the project's finances, yet you're publicly implying financial impropriety without evidence.
I've raised substantially more funding for the new Freenet in the past 5 years than was raised during the entire prior 20-year history of the project.
> were awarded specifically for "protection against surveillance and censorship" that the "new freenet" does not even aim to provide.
In what way does a decentralized network with optional anonymity not protect against surveillance and censorship?
> "The board" of the non-profit seems to have been culled just before the decision. I don't know why, I wasn't on it. Maybe @agl can shime in (he was).
You also acknowledge here that you don't know what happened. Those board members' departures were at their request because they were no longer actively involved in the project.
> All I know is that this could have been handled better.
I'm sure you're right about that. But my experience at the time was that the disagreement was fundamentally about the outcome, not the process.
The fact that evidence is not provided, if anything, is an indication of potential wrong doing.
I also note that you did not actually respond to what I said. This is additional indication of some 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.
And you are still not addressing the question here, which only compounds the suspicions.
I win this argument, and you lose.
I win this argument and you lose.
lol
This isn't even the first time we did a ground-up redesign/rewrite of the Freenet codebase, we did this in 2008 with the 0.7 release.
Number of contributors or pull requests isn't a good metric at the moment since the advent of Claude Code et al. has seen a dramatic uptick in both everywhere.
You can have a very technically successful project, but it doesn't mean it'll be used.
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.
We will also have a decentralized reputation system that will protect people from being exposed to unsavory or illegal content, a common criticism of the old Freenet architecture.
I know you designed the thing, and that was a great effort, but what a miss when compared to the vast majority of freenet users priorities.
Similarly, reputation systems aren't inherently coercive, they're more analogous to spam filtering or trust heuristics, mechanisms for deciding what to prioritize - but ultimate control always remains with the user.
I’m not a fan of “think of the children“ arguments but the Internet cannot actually be a complete free for all and “freedom of speech” is not some magic shield that overrides all other ethical considerations. CSAM is not a particularly high bar and frankly if you want people to throw in with you then you can’t brush it off so lightly.
Yet you're making one.
> the Internet cannot actually be a complete free for all
Yet in many important ways, it is.
As much as publishers would like to shut down Scihub, it exists. The Pirate Bay famously persists. Nation states with entirely opposed legal systems connect and interoperate to at least some degree.
The OP said: "Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for, and freely speaking can result in all kinds of repressions."
Which is objectively true.
You're throwing reporters, political dissidents, whistleblowers, minority groups, and just regular people who don't appreciate the Stasi in with the child pornographers which some might take as an insult and offense.
What kind of criminal does Phil Zimmermann look like to you? We had this argument already in the 90s.
And yet, it's materially all anonymity is actually for in practice, within a margin of error. Tor - mostly crime & CSAM. Crypto - mostly crime. 4chan - mostly degeneracy, some crime. Faceless Corporations - used for crime, and things that should be crimes, but hide under other names.
Imagine an application where an authorized group of users can create and vote in polls, using cryptographic signatures and public/private keys for user verification.
What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?
Blockchains solve this by having state get more authoritative as blocks age. To undo the `poll_didnt_reach_quorum` state transition from 2024, one would have to rewind all blocks that have been created since, and PoW / PoS ensures that this is incredibly costly to do.
On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?
> It feels like the state merging approach just pushes the hard problems onto the user, without giving them the tools to solve those problems properly.
We've created many of these tools, and have used them to implement practical applications like group chat, a CMS, and a social network, and we and others will build many more tools over time. Designing applications for Freenet can require some creative problem solving, but each problem only needs to be solved once.
> What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?
You could solve this similarly to Bitcoin by having a mechanism that "locks" poll results at a particular point in time to prevent subsequent additions, analogous to how mining repeatedly locks in the blockchain.
> On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?
Peers in the network track cost/benefit of each connected peer, so if a peer starts to consume a lot more resources than it provides then its neighbors will disconnect, a kind of immune response.
I'm sure that once the network is big enough to attract large-scale attacks we'll need to adapt our approach, but I think we have a solid starting point.
- 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 & 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 & updates.
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.
One weakness is that we trust the message author to provide an accurate message timestamp, however bad behavior such as manipulating timestamps can be addressed by banning the user from the room.
(the main thing I'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 / pipeline requests / define "fail if any err / pair errors with requests" for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)
The issue was that Freenet requires that intermediate peers can cache the contract state as they're passing it back to the requestor so in the end I decided against it, but might revisit in the future.
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'd have an absurdly flexible system with fairly small requests. I'm just not sure how small, or if it'd end up computationally worth it compared to graphql / sparql / etc.
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.
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.
Freenet's approach works well for things like group chat, where temporary inconsistency is mostly just an irritation, but for a cryptocurrency it is fatal.
I'm not saying you couldn't build a cryptocurrency on Freenet, but you'd still need a solution to that problem.
Currently it appears centralized, but in principle it'd be pretty easy to shift it to a web of trust instead, and hosts can choose what they allow and how much they value it.
(zero-knowledge proofs seem probably rather important to adopt tho, as right now it'll tie you to a stable pseudonym)
- You participate in a secret cabal, and don't want participants' identities be visible to each other.
- You'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't be technically capable of reporting their identities.
- You're selling illegal goods or services.
I'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).
> We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.
Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
Thank you!
> Where can I learn more about this?
If you don't mind watching a video I gave this talk back in March that should be fairly comprehensive: https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0?si=R4ifrsfEUJfvjDPx
If you would prefer an article I recommend: https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/
> How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
It'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.
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/application define the merge operation is clever. I assume it would mean contracts could opt in to idempotency if it doesn'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't suited for anything transactional.
> 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's summary/delta synchronization mechanism implicitly disregards duplicate updates. The idea is that a peer A creates a "summary" of a contract's state which is sent to the other peer B which then creates a "delta", which contains anything in B's state that isn't in A's state. The delta is then sent from B to A bringing A'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.
> 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't suited for anything transactional.
That's correct, Freenet doesn'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.
but "makes sense" and ways to optimize that can change massively with context. e.g. for a chat app, as soon as you see "deleted message X", you can reasonably drop X and all past and future changes to X because they won't be shown by anyone (don't even need to sync them). if you do that with "deleted chars 87..93" 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'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 "best" for all data, and the storage/computation/transmission savings can be extreme.
and when played out of order, it's guaranteed to resolve to foobaz eventually or immediately, depending on when messages are received
when you encounter the scenario of a fork, there's usually a fork resolution rule, e.g. D: { "prev_hash": "<hash of B>", "content": "foobazbar" }
to resolve C vs D, sort lexicographically, choose direction of sort order and pick first
When 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.
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.
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'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's Internet was like, super slow, crazy unhinged nerds all over the place random collections of links, crazy.
Thanks for all you've done Ian
Edit: Btw what is the best way to support the project and get involved?
If you're in a position to support the project financially you're more than welcome to donate[1], we're a 501c3 non-profit and all funds go to support development.
If you're a developer and are interested in building on Freenet I suggest starting with https://freenet.org/build/manual/tutorial/, you can also join our Matrix room[2], or install Freenet[3] and chat with us on River[3], our decentralized group chat.
[1] https://freenet.org/donate/
A cryptocurrency-based solution like you suggest will undoubtedly be one of a menu of reputation bootstrapping options that will develop over time.
Don'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.
> Reputation systems have been a theoretical idea for a while, but we haven't come up with anything sybil-proof without centralized identity management.
I don't think it's accurate to say that we haven't come up with anything. The original Freenet has had a decentralized web-of-trust plugin for over 20 years[0].
It's far from perfect, in practice it seems to have empowered a small number of people with disproportionate influence - but that's due to solvable design issues, it's not a sybil problem.
It's also important to distinguish between sybil-proof and "raising the cost of sybil attacks to the point that they're manageable".
I do agree with your broader point that there is massive scope for building truly decentralized governance systems on Freenet. I've done some thinking about it but it's still very speculative[1].
[0] https://github.com/hyphanet/plugin-WebOfTrust
[1] https://freenet.org/about/news/799-proof-of-trust-a-wealth-u...
And sure, they can be, if they adopt patterns that allow it. I can also find plenty of counter-examples. I don't think "humans are less vulnerable to sybil attacks than automated systems" is a weakly-defensible stance at all.
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.
How can anonymity be built on top of this system?
For ghost keys issuance, like with other privacy products, I'd really like to be able to buy redeem coupons in real life, not through stripe and all other online payment providers.
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].
Been chatting a lot with the HolePunch/Tether folks, and their work is impressive, particularly the use of the DHT for all signaling, Tailscale-inspired (aka Birthday Paradox) NAT hole-punching, an entire JavaScript runtime, etc. I'm curious about some of those details in Freenet. In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?
Either way, congrats!
> What's it look like over the wire?
Encrypted UDP, but likely identifiable based on timing etc - we're not trying to hide it right now - the focus is more on decentralization.
> In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?
Depends on what you mean by "fully". When peers first start up they need to connect to a "gateway", a freenet peer that can receive unexpected inbound UDP. But gateways are only required to introduce peers to the network, after the initial introduction they form new connections through the network.
Right now we run these introductory gateways but will decentralize it over time.
Curious about mobile though, you mentioned iOS is the main blocker because of wasm restrictions. Is the plan to run the peer on desktop and have mobile just connect to it, or are you expecting people to run a full peer on Android?
Now, whether giving up anonymity was worth it is a separate issue.
Citation needed? IIRC, the general advice for running a Tor relay is "don't, unless you want an endless supply of abuse complaints". So you'd require a jurisdiction that ignores abuse complaints.
Freenet seems to not interoperate with the existing WWW as much, while at the same time giving more specification on a specific routing and WASM validator. The existing WWW and Braid leave those decisions up to each particular host/authority to decide.
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.
> 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).
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:
https://github.com/dharmatech/9social
Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI
It is hard to grok what Contracts, etc. etc. allow you to do in the abstract so working through how it allows us to build a decentralized GitHub might be a good anchor in a tangible use case.
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.
OK, time for inception... 9social on freenet-git
¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Think of it as going back to the Internet's decentralized roots.
I integrated "Fair Tunes", which tried to pay musicians for mp3 files, long before any label was selling mp3'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 'snarf'. I've never said it out loud.)
I am thinking about making a public proxy available so people can try the network itself without installing it, but we've made installation as quick and painless as possible.
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'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
If you don't mind I'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.
> 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't looked into properly.)
The new version doesn't claim to provide anonymity as part of the platform itself although anonymity systems can be built on top of it. I'd also refer you to this FAQ [2].
[1] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-do-the-previous-and-curre...
[2] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...
Ed: I guess you'd need a way to run wasm in wasm, and a way to author wasm contracts - and there's not yet a wasm-hosted rust compiler?
Ed2: I'm not up to date on the state of self-hosted wasm compiler/languages... But I did come across:
https://github.com/remko/waforth
I guess it's time to dig out the thesis[t] again and look at movable code and p2p classifications again ...
[t] https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/net_arch_sty...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469711 - Ian Clarke explains the next generation of Freenet [video] (2023)
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.
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 "board".
The "board" was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
The funding of the existing, original "Freenet" was repurposed for the new one of course.
The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,
while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet" at:
https://www.hyphanet.org/