[saurik]

(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".)

Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technology, you might look at Tor, or the "out-proxies" from I2P).

[zzalpha]

So what are the benefits over Tor?

[HelloNurse]

It seems intended to be more anonymous and decentralized than Tor, and safer thanks to the strength of numbers, but their whitepaper is diseharteningly incomplete and disingenuous, particularly about problems that are shared with Tor.

For example:

"The distribution of Entry Nodes is a difficult topic. If oppressive governments are able to access this list, they will block user’s abilities to access the list."

Or simply, you know, go after whoever runs entry nodes. Or run their own entry nodes and, even if they can't compromise the network, trace the evil cypherpunks who want to use encryption.

Unfortunately, some practical and political problems cannot be solved with improved cryptography.

[g_simonsson]

Certainly incomplete as it is still a draft, though I'd contest "dishearteningly". Also, why do you find it disingenuous? We're not shying away from what entry nodes and bootstrap of user clients is one of the hardest problems to solve.

[saurik]

There are a number of differences (which one might say would take an entire whitepaper to describe ;P), but as one high-level and in my mind very interesting example, Tor actually is a centralized service where nine directory servers are able to decide the state of the network; we are accepting nothing less than a fully-decentralized system.

[woodandsteel]

Is this a darknet or a way of accessing the clearnet or both?

[saurik]

Given your question's wording the answer is, at this time and as currently described, "a way of accessing the clearnet", with no already-existing features for hidden services.

[woodandsteel]

That sounds like you are thinking of maybe adding hidden services in the future, am I reading you correctly?

[saurik]

There is active discussion of this, which means I am not prepared to say it won't happen or that it can't happen, but I am also not prepared to guarantee it will happen (as then you will ask when ;P).

[woodandsteel]

But given that it is open source, if you decide not to, someone else still could.