Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps

There actually are: among the darknets, Hyphanet is the only one that has a main use for "deviant data resistant to censorship":

Example publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135485651880663...

> What are the content patterns on Freenet? Four patterns were identified. Freenet is (1) an archive of deviant data resistant to censorship (2) a space dominated by content associated with masculinity, (3) a nonmarket space where commercial exchange is non-existent, and (4) an empty space with many requests not returning information, and many flogs abandoned. We asked a third question: How does the analysis of Freenet inform current understandings of hacker culture? Freenet, we suggest, can be understood as a type of digital “wilderness”. It is a singular darknet space, supporting a distinct set of hacker practices

Practically: people in Hyphanet blog about stuff they dare not blog about in the clearnet -- anything from radical politics (from all kinds, left, right, libertarian, …) over personal opinion pages to wilder stuff like magick (yes, in that spelling).

Not to forget the Russian Poet who’s posting daily poems with the goal (as he wrote) that those poems still survive after police knocked at his door.

(besides talk about hyphanet and privacy tech)

So yes: I don’t understand the downvotes either, because it’s a legitimate question with a pretty clear answer: yes.

Thank you for the downvotes.

You're moving the debate here. The question was "How are the goals different?" from the project leader (who ought to know better), not whether moving them makes sense.

the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information. For better or worse, that was the point of it. It also drove the UX and tradeoffs for the network.

It was slower than Kazaa/bittorrent, but it was far harder to work out who was shareing what. (if memory serves it also chunked files up so they weren;t on the same machine, but that could be me misremembering)

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".

This reminds me of something someone said. Something about assume everyone is coming from a place of good intent. Even if they are not, you can communicate with people more effectively without bringing in a form of bias that ends up infecting everything.

Just because you have a belief about something doesn't make it right to always assume the worst from people and that you always have the best answer.

I tend to avoid people that don't come from a place of good faith. And I feel that attacking people because you might be right about something is coming from a place of bad faith and isn't always the best course of action. There is a place for that, when it comes to your freedom being violated or something, but when it comes to having discussions with people, we are all human. Ego can be a determinant.

> I prefer to say what I believe to be true rather than live in fear of how people looking

Again, as we are wondering into tumblr style debates here (ie not listening and just saying what you think they said)

There is a difference between being "right" and being "effective"

Or to put it another way: "perfect is the enemy of good"

However I will break it down a bit more. You agree with me that there is such thing as a horizon of "acceptable opinion" for people? Some have larger windows, some much narrower.

If we agree on that, I would ask, what happens if someone goes in hard (rhetorically) with a viewpoint that is outside of "acceptable opinion"? You begin to discount their opinion, regardless of evidence. Or it requires a much high bar to accept _any_ opinion from that person.

Which leads back to the original point, you may be correct, but you are unable to persuade anyone else that you are correct, because you are not speaking the same language and gently pulling them to your viewpoint.

Hence the "you can be right, or you can be effective"

I, for one, don’t think I’ve misconstrued anything — you’ve shown exactly who you are relatively clearly in those posts.