Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web

Posted by udev4096 10/27/2024

Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web(freenet.org)

179 points | 99 commentspage 2

SagelyGuru 10/27/2024|

Leave the field to the censors, create an alternative, and hope that they will not pursue you? Or stand your ground and fight them wherever they are? That is the question.

CertumIter 10/28/2024|

Let's do both, since one fosters the other.

wutwutwat 10/27/2024||

www is already decentralized

sanity 10/27/2024||

Theoretically you can run a web server at home but you'll have a problem if you start to get a lot of traffic or you have trouble with your internet connection. Your website will be trivially easy to DDoS.

Services you create on Freenet will scale automatically and are immune to DDoS.

serf 10/28/2024||

it doesn't really scale in the traditional sense, it just pushes the 'damage' out to the entire net.

freenet overall is one of the most bandwidth and storage intensive platforms out there. I understand why -- but I say this as a means to say that it doesn't really deserve direct comparison to the open web. it's not the same thing, even if the work overlaps -- it's a lot more work.

sanity 10/28/2024||

"Damage" is misleading. A DDoS only harms when concentrated on a few peers. Freenet distributes load across the network, autoscaling in response to demand and preventing overload.

As for bandwidth and storage, I think you’re referring to the old Freenet (now Hyphanet). The new Freenet is optimized for lighter services like group chat and isn’t designed for heavy data sharing like BitTorrent. It should be much less of a bandwidth hog.

_nalply 10/27/2024|||

To some extent yes.

However to host something yourself you need a lot of things, for example FTTH to host it at your home, or a hosting provider; then a domain name and other things. These can be taken away from you.

wutwutwat 10/28/2024|||

Pretty sure that freenet also requires some sort of ISP to provide a ethernet connection to your machines, which can still be taken away from you. This doesn't change the fact that the www is decentralized already

sanity 10/28/2024||

Eventually Freenet will work over mesh networks like Lora and 802.11ah - meaning it will be entirely decentralized including the communication infrastructure.

arcticbull 10/27/2024||||

You don’t need fiber to host basic services, and once you do, it’s not really a problem.

squarefoot 10/27/2024||

You need a public IP, though, and many home contracts put customers behind NAT.

imoverclocked 10/27/2024||||

How does freenet let you own something outright?

sanity 10/27/2024||

On Freenet you own things cryptographically, typically by possessing a private key.

This is similar to a Bitcoin wallet although Freenet isn't a cryptocurrency, it's a general-purpose platform for building and distributing scalable decentralized services.

lottin 10/27/2024|||

Your point being?

_nalply 10/27/2024||

When many people have the ability to publish independently without relying on a central service, then it’s decentralized. The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.

In practice, however, this didn’t quite work out. Most people publish through centralized services like Instagram, to name just one.

There are two main obstacles to achieving decentralization. The first is technical difficulty: not everyone wants to learn how to run a web server. The second is reliance on foundational services like domain names and hosting, which can be revoked. For example, if the authorities think you did something illegal, boom, your domain name got confiscated.

So, no, in practice, the World Wide Web isn’t truly decentralized. But at least there remains some possibility for it.

lottin 10/27/2024|||

Thanks. I think we've always had the ability to publish content on the internet without relying on external services, and we still have. It's just not something that most people are willing to do, because it takes expertise and resources, and corporations can do it better by specializing in providing these kind of services. This is why people use them. For the same reason people don't usually make their own clothes, furniture, etc., either. Specialization and division of labour allows us to be much more productive and as a result enjoy a higher standard of living than we would if every individual had to produce everything they consume themself.

wkat4242 10/28/2024||||

The WWW is also not really decentralized anymore because 90% is hosted on one of a handful of hyperscalers. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare.

immibis 10/28/2024||

Eh, besides Cloudflare, you're pouring money down the drain if you're using any of those. Remember that recent thread where some open source project was spending $100/month on a Vercel database handling 3 requests per minute that could have been a $4 VPS?

Non-hyperscaler server hosting is a pretty competitive business that doesn't need further decentralization at this time, though it's not a bad thing either.

giantrobot 10/27/2024|||

> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.

Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access).

A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline.

This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.

nixdev 10/28/2024|||

ARIN and ICANN are centralized. WWW can run over alternative number and naming spaces but in practice doesn't do this except for Tor and to a much lesser extent i2p.

"www is already decentralized", okay but not in reality, not even a little bit.

akira2501 10/28/2024|||

Yet monopolized enough that this decentralization does not prevent deplatforming.

wutwutwat 10/28/2024||

you can spin up as many nodes on the internet to have as many platforms as you want, nothing is stopping you. getting booted from some company's platform for violating some company's tos does not mean the world wide web is not decentralized

akira2501 10/28/2024||

PKI and DNS are centralized and any of the _three_ major browsers rely on them and actively deny features if they are not present.

I mean, sure, packet routing is decentralized, and if you're a military operator, this might matter to you, if you're someone who wants a public voice it's not significant.

wetpaws 10/27/2024||

[dead]

angelorue 10/27/2024||

It seems interesting, I've seen this before, but i'm lost. How do I get it, does it incorporate with the OG internet or what?

sanity 10/27/2024|

We haven't launched yet but we're very[1] close, hopefully just days away as we tie up loose ends.

This[2] diagram hopefully gives a big-picture view of where Freenet fits in. You install the Freenet software (which is tiny, less than 10MB) and then you can access Freenet through your web browser just like with the world wide web. The difference is that there are no servers or datacenters, it's all decentralized.

[1] https://freenet.org/news/weekly-dev-meeting-2024-10-11/

[2] https://docs.freenet.org

brunoqc 10/28/2024||

It's taking a while for the new version to come out. It has been "weeks away" for like a year now.

sanity 10/28/2024|

That's fair, in December last year we realized that we'd need to implement our own transport layer after discovering that the off-the-shelf library we planned to use wasn't flexible enough for our needs.

But the new transport layer is done, unit tests pass, simulations are working, and we're now cleaning up loose ends so this time I think we really are days or weeks away.

brunoqc 10/28/2024||

Glad to hear that progress is being made. I can't wait to try it. Thanks!

ceving 10/30/2024||

If it is a distributed computer: how to prevent crypto mining?

sanity 10/30/2024|

Good question - computationally expensive contracts will be removed automatically as part of a mechanism that keeps track of cost/benefit to the peer for each contract.

vfclists 10/29/2024|

First step in checking out Freenet - Click on link to see some video about Freenet - https://freenet.org/news/ghost-keys-ian-interview/

Google video saying "Sign in to prove that you are not a bot"

Ian? Freenet? Really?

Am I a joke to you?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GbE3OkwWwAA25N_?format=jpg&name=...

sanity 10/29/2024|

Look under the video and you'll find links to the same video on Rumble and X, take your pick.