The New Freenet

Freenet was born in 1999 but has been redesigned, and rewritten in Rust by the same crew, but with a larger vision. Freenet is a robust and performant self-contained mixnet closer in spirit to i2p than to Tor.

intro

Ian Clarke is the public face of the project, which benefits greatly from having a well-spoken system architect as public champion. Here's what the dashboard looks like:

It did not take long to get connected to other nodes. I haven't learned this network yet, or the details like how many nodes I would ideally peer with, how many smart contracts I should expect to load and so on.

the network

Meanwhile, there is this nice network status dashboard to look at:

I found a really nice explorer that shows nodes and contracts a bit differently from the dashboard; it is called net-graph. Here is the nodes view with nice graph:

You can always load these contracts by using the contract id as the final url fragment:

http://localhost:7509/v1/contract/<contract>

The contract for net-graph, for example, is HDNhnuFs6C1Rp1i2wpMvAcMLWvaRbgaNqHpropGQvPZr, as you can see in the example. Here next is the contract view. It allows searching by pretty much any method - here I search for the word "delta" which is the name of an app.

publishing content

That "delta" contract/app is an important one because it allows for easy publishing of web content. Markdown is used to format. Here is the link, and here is what it looks like:

Notice the sites that I visited are on the left. If you have a link to one, click and wait for the little green light at bottom left, then refresh the page and it will have loaded. At the top of the list is mine - with 3 pages of not much, frankly. There is also a contract that allows publishing static web content - no editing.

river chat

The main chat app is called River, found here. This is a decentralized app demonstrating the method of building these network apps. It always has people in it, and is a great place to ask questions.

freenet mail

Freenet has its own mail app, similar to i2p susimail app, which lets users send messages. It is looking nice now, but does not yet have all the bells and whistles.

exploring

There is an app called "Atlas" to help guide you to some of the most popular locations. The contract is linked to from the bottom of your dashboard page (along with Delta, the publishing app)

Here's the actual design, not yet realized:

Finally, here are a couple random sites I found and liked:

Please try it out by visiting freenet and following the instructions to download. See you on Freenet!