| Freenet development is NOT dead! :) I have been contributing for ~ 12 years and now have acquired long-term funding (independent of Freenet's own funding!) to continue my contributions in a more intense fashion. The core network which serves static HTML sites + audio/video is stable and usable. It has a bunch of reliable long-term contributors working on it. Hence development on my personal side is focused on polishing existing dynamic applications which are built on top of Freenet, and implementing some new ones. Basic implementations of notably forums, social networking, blogging and mail exist already, the goal is to make them easy to use (integrate them into the main UI instead of being standalone), add much more features, improve performance and security. Here's a list of these and dozens of other apps built on Freenet: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects Developing dynamic stuff is taking so long because it is a complex endeavor: On the regular Internet, censorship happens by "look up who owns the IP, go to their address, remove the computer." Since this is not possible on Freenet as everyone is anonymous, censorship will happen by denial of service: For example forum systems would be spammed to death to get rid of unwanted content. Thus the architecture of censorship-resistant systems has to be reinvented from scratch, you can't just take a regular forum system and stick Freenet on top of it. It has to be decentralized to be resistant against DoS - there must not be Tor-alike central servers ("hidden sites" / .onion sites). Instead messages are stored across the whole network and replicated automatically if they are downloaded more often and thus need more bandwidth (the added redundance also makes them more censorship-resistant). And spam filtering need to be a first-class application, I have worked for years only on that. So the different architecture is the primary pitfall which many projects which decided "Freenet is too old, we're gonna build this from scratch with nice Javascript etc." fell into IMHO:
First it's "we'll develop a regular app, we can bolt Tor onto it later", then they realize that the threat-model is so different that this is just not possible and the projects never become anonymous/censorship-resistant. So privacy needs to be built in from the start. Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first anti-censorship + privacy network!), and I don't mind that it's taking decades to develop because of the extended threat model: That's still better than being one of wheel-reinventing post-Freenet projects which then abandon the privacy idea in the end anyway, or postpone it forever. |
This isn't even close to true.
There are many networks that predate you, provide real anonymity, and still remove the child pornography that would otherwise taint them and their maintainers.
You just play games with the definition of censorship.
When people tell you "you shouldn't be the vendor of the sexual abuse of children," you try to turn it into a censorship issue. Like people somehow have the right to publish this.
Except they don't, and you've become so addicted to a decade of hiding behind that shield that you don't realize what a villain it has actually turned you into.
The reason the other networks exist is that people actually to want privacy, but they won't shame themselves by swimming in your child pornography filled pool.
Stop telling us the way to fix your network is to participate, and water the numbers down.
Fix your miserable problem.