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New Freenet Network Launches, Along With 'River' Group Chat (freenet.org) 26

Posted by EditorDavid from the free-as-in-freedom dept.
Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet's new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
"While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer," Clarke wrote in 2023, "allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others... designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user."

"Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,"
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New Freenet Network Launches, Along With 'River' Group Chat More

New Freenet Network Launches, Along With 'River' Group Chat

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  • Like zines, ripped media, and functional "illegal" 3D shape files.

    • Yes... but that will also be CSAM.

    • there's not really anything like that on hyphanet (the thing old freenet is called by the organization that made old freenet because there was a holy war)

      it's really just a bunch of weird nerds partying like it's 1999 in terms of UI design

      • like, freenet, even the old one, is not a real darknet at all so anybody who ever put that on there definitely got caught immediately

  • ...providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,

    Do people still want that? I thought everyone wanted their group chat to be "appy". Not like an IRC convo or vBulletin.

    • ...providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,

      Do people still want that? I thought everyone wanted their group chat to be "appy". Not like an IRC convo or vBulletin.

      This person does. (I dunno if I want to use the new Freenet or not, but stuff being more webby and less appy would be cool in general)

    • there are elder millenials who remember what they took from us

  • This looks very cool. I will check it out. Seems like its coming out at a very important time for decentralization.

  • 2023 (Score:2)

    by arnowa ( 640300 )
    Is news from 2023 worth being featured on slashdot so lately?

  • Here is the correct one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • No anonymity (Score:3)

    by allo ( 1728082 ) on Sunday March 15, 2026 @10:50AM (#66042498)

    From their FAQ:

    Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.

    Looks like it is a layer for self hosting and distributed routing, but no longer anonymizing sender and receiver.

    • ohhhh, okay, so this just IS the new fake bullshit freenet I'd already read about a while ago

      dunno how I feel about this; the layering approach actually makes sense from the perspective of an idea I've had for a while: running a system with an i2p router, a freenet node, and an xmpp server that stuff encrypted logs into freenet

      but the fact that they abandon the in-built anonymity stuff that was bad on purpose in the first freenet (now hyphanet) really just makes it seem like they're ideologically committed

  • Where does the data live? (Score:3)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday March 15, 2026 @12:29PM (#66042602)
    Watched the video and took a quick look at the website and it's not clear to me where the data lives persistently. I get that there is synchronization and it sounds like that there is some logic to keep cached copies of stuff on multiple nodes based on popularity and the numbers of others subscribing. But say I want to host a personal website or some data of mine that I want to share with others. If that data isn't popular enough and I have no subscribers, does that data only exist in my local node, on my desktop machine? If I want to ensure that the data isn't lost, and is available when my desktop computer is off, do I have to ensure that another node is running on a backed up machine in a hosting facility somewhere? I think the answer to these questions is "yes", but that reality doesn't seem clear in the promotional material, which seems to just say "It's on the Freenet network". This isn't necessarily bad, and does have the advantage that I can control who has access to said node, but sounds like I would still be responsible for a bunch of always on and redundant infrastructure, which is one of things that drove people to centralized data models and "cloud hosting" historically.

    • Re:Where does the data live? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Sunday March 15, 2026 @01:26PM (#66042712) Homepage Journal

      Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

      • Are you working on this thing? I've been unkind to it because I have deep distrust of the anti-anonymity stance of freenet's devs (which was really a thing with old freenet, it's not a real darknet) but the layering thing the new project talks about reminds me of an idea I had for what to do about the anonymity problem before I even knew about the hyphanet/freenet split. I wonder what you think of an idea I've been kicking around about it. I've been calling it the ungovernable network stack. It's not someth

  • gonna have to look some things up, but something about this makes very little sense to me

    the org that made freenet had a holy war some time ago, renamed freenet to hyphanet, (except nobody on freenet calls it that) and started working on something else called freenet that was even less anonymizing than hyphanet was

    since there isn't realistically any such thing as censorship-resistance without anonymity, just a way to get yourself thrown down a well for speaking freely, it's kind of out of left field to see

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