Freenet is pure P2P, and there's no option for Internet access. Also, it doesn't do onion routing like Tor or I2P do. It employs a sophisticated encryption and forwarding strategy, to obfuscate senders and recipients from innocent intermediaries. So arguably, any peer can plausibly claim that they're just an intermediary, handling end-to-end encrypted content.
However, given logging data from malicious peers, adversaries can discover peers that handle illegal content. Then they can attempt to distinguish senders and recipients from innocent intermediaries, through statistical traffic analysis. And then they can arrest and prosecute them. And defendants must then counter claims about attribution.
The default is Darknet mode, where nodes only peer with people who they know and trust. But given how people are, it's hard to prevent infiltration.
Also, with a Darknet, there's no access to the rest of Freenet. The recommended option is having one node in a Darknet also run in Opennet mode. So then they're the only one at risk. But that funnels all Darknet traffic with the rest of Freenet through them.
Anyway, Freenet is interesting. But I do not recommend using it, except on a thoroughly anonymous VPS, managed and accessed through nested VPN chains and Tor.
However, given logging data from malicious peers, adversaries can discover peers that handle illegal content. Then they can attempt to distinguish senders and recipients from innocent intermediaries, through statistical traffic analysis. And then they can arrest and prosecute them. And defendants must then counter claims about attribution.
The default is Darknet mode, where nodes only peer with people who they know and trust. But given how people are, it's hard to prevent infiltration.
Also, with a Darknet, there's no access to the rest of Freenet. The recommended option is having one node in a Darknet also run in Opennet mode. So then they're the only one at risk. But that funnels all Darknet traffic with the rest of Freenet through them.
Anyway, Freenet is interesting. But I do not recommend using it, except on a thoroughly anonymous VPS, managed and accessed through nested VPN chains and Tor.