Let's Decentralize

submitted by CompleteDoubterII from letsdecentralize.org

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[–]CompleteDoubterII[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Also posted this on Notabug.

[–]Tiwaking 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Wow these are really interesting!

Freenet is "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship." [Wikipedia]

Freenet's first release was on March 2000. It is (probably) the oldest project on this page (other than Gopher), and is still receiving regular updates to this day.

Unlike ZeroNet and IPFS, you do not necessarily have control over the data that is seeded on your device. Data is split into several small blocks, which are replicated to multiple nodes. You designate a set amount of disk space to give Freenet (usually between fifteen and fifty gigabytes), and it caches the most popular information on the network. The more frequently accessed a Freenet site is by Freenet users, the more users that will seed the content. Data is encrypted on disk, and can only be accessed through Freenet's web interface.

(GUIDE TO BE WRITTEN)

[–]BravoVictor 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, it's been around for a while, and unfortunately is pretty shitty. I tried it a few years ago. It's basically if the web was all hosted on Onion routers, which is to say horribly slow and reliant entirely on enough random users hosting your site...which is to say it's not reliable.

And it's pure free speech model is also a double edged sword. The encryption ensure that the users running their local node don't know what they're hosting, so there really is no way to censor anything, even things like child porn. So anyone hosting a Freenet site doesn't know if they're helping an oppressed Chinese dissident trying to expose corruption or a pedophile hiding their porn stash.