[cess11]

I kind of see "focus" in the FAQ and "goals" in this thread as interchangeable.

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".

[sanity]

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

[cess11]

Fine. Page 6, which is Chapter 2, under the heading Aims, there is a numbered list. What is the second item in this list?

[sanity]

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

[cess11]

I'll quote it then:

   2. It should provide anonymity to b oth providers and consumers of informa-
      tion

[sanity]

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