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

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

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266

by sanity

For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).

The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine.

Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.

We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.

This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.

Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.

If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].

[1] https://github.com/freenet/river

[2] https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/

[3] https://freenet.org/quickstart/

[4] https://freenet.org/faq/

[5] https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0

qcl820DV34
1872d
Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team's work,
in favor of a rewrite from different developers, without asking anyone on the original team.
It was an ivory tower decision which was announced on the mailing list without prior discussion.
The old team did not agree, yet it was forced through by a decision of the "board".
The "board" was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
The funding of the existing, original "Freenet" was repurposed for the new one of course.
The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,
while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet" at:
https://www.hyphanet.org/
1. pikdum
  342d
  Yeah, I'm not a fan. Feels like this project is trying to get popular off of Freenet's name recognition rather than its own merits.
  1. koolba
    332d
    The submitter is the creator of the original Freenet. If anybody gets to decide what we will call Freenet, it’s him.
    pikdum
    241d
    I'd agree if this was more like a Freenet v3, but it's an entirely different project with completely different goals.
2. sanity • OP
  1072d
  > Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team's work,
  This is a false narrative, from the Freenet FAQ[1]:
  Why was Freenet rearchitected and rebranded?
  In 2019, Ian began developing a successor to the original Freenet, internally named “Locutus.” This redesign was a ground-up reimagining, incorporating lessons learned from the original Freenet and addressing modern challenges. The original Freenet, although groundbreaking, was built for an earlier era.
  This isn’t the first time Freenet has undergone significant changes. Around 2005, we transitioned from version 0.5 to 0.7, which was a complete rewrite introducing “friend-to-friend” networking.
  In March 2023, the original Freenet (developed from 2005 onwards) was spun off into an independent project called “Hyphanet” under its existing maintainers. Concurrently, “Locutus” was rebranded as “Freenet,” also known as “Freenet 2023,” to signal this new direction and focus. The rearchitected Freenet is faster, more flexible, and better equipped to offer a robust, decentralized alternative to the increasingly centralized web.
  To ease the transition the old freenetproject.org domain was redirected to hyphanet’s website, while the recently acquired freenet.org domain was used for the new architecture.
  It is important to note that the maintainers of the original Freenet did not agree with the decision to rearchitect and rebrand. However, as the architect of the Freenet Project, and after over a year of debate, Ian felt this was the necessary path forward to ensure the project’s continued relevance and success in a world far different than when he designed the previous architecture.
  > The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,
  Because the new Freenet will have a menu of anonymity options rather than committing to a one-size-fits-all approach, while also addressing the issue of illegal content[2].
  [1] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected...
  [2] https://freenet.org/about/faq/#how-does-freenet-handle-harmf...
3. stackghost
  12d
  >while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet"
  Well, that name pretty much dooms the project to a slow death in obscurity.
  1. tardedmeme
    01d
    To play devil's advocate, wasn't it already long dead?
4. outside2344
  252d
  So he forked the project and went his own way. I am not sure I see the issue here. This is how we do open source on the internet. You don't have to join him, but he also has the right to go his own way too.
  1. nextgens
    81d
    You're getting this wrong.
    He has forked the project (to something that does not share the same goals so "fork" is arguable here), took the name, the cash and the goodwill.
    We went from "we have enough donations/donators" to "how do we pay for the upcoming AWS bill?".
    As someone who has been fairly active on the "old freenet", I have never cared about money nor funding... but I cannot help but notice that some has likely been misappropriated. Things like the SUMA award (https://web.archive.org/web/20150320201527/http://suma-award...) were awarded specifically for "protection against surveillance and censorship" that the "new freenet" does not even aim to provide.
    "The board" of the non-profit seems to have been culled just before the decision. I don't know why, I wasn't on it. Maybe @agl can shime in (he was).
    All I know is that this could have been handled better. It's what I wrote back then on https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5527...
5. dyauspitr
  01d
  Isn’t anonymity the one and only point of freenet.
6. seany
  01d
  anonymity was the main point of freenet... So weird
7. SuperNinKenDo
  01d
  Thanks so much for the heads up. I loved Freenet as a concept back in the day and used to devote a significant chunk of my tiny hard drive to trying to help out. I looked it up a few months ago and honestly thought I was experiencing some kind of memory dailure when I saw the new project under that name. Was wondering what the project I was so excited for had _actually_ been called all those years back. Now I know what happened, and where to find the project I actually liked.
8. nightpool
  112d
  I'm very glad to hear that—the anonymity of the original Freenet has led to it being a very unsavory place that was more well known for CSAM then anything positive or useful. As an outsider, it sounds like this new direction is the right choice for Freenet to try and attract new users and fulfill the team's original goals.
  1. qcl820DV34
    102d
    Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for, and freely speaking can result in all kinds of repressions.
    And even without agreeing on whether people should be anonymous on the Internet,
    it could be agreed that replacing a software which guards against a certain threat model (repressions) with one which does not,
    without changing the name, is not exactly a wise decision.
9. pidgeon_lover
  01d
  I wasn't very happy as a user with an interest in tech/internet history to find my old bookmarks and notes had been hijacked by the new renamed project. The Original Freenet (Hyphanet) was quite interesting. The new one, less so, especially with the name hijacking.
miki123211
22d
It feels like the state merging approach just pushes the hard problems onto the user, without giving them the tools to solve those problems properly.
Imagine an application where an authorized group of users can create and vote in polls, using cryptographic signatures and public/private keys for user verification.
What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?
Blockchains solve this by having state get more authoritative as blocks age. To undo the `poll_didnt_reach_quorum` state transition from 2024, one would have to rewind all blocks that have been created since, and PoW / PoS ensures that this is incredibly costly to do.
On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?
1. sanity • OP
mweidner
52d
For values that don't have a natural merge function (or where you don't want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead? That is:
- The synced value is a history of client updates, sorted in some eventually consistent order (e.g. by hybrid logical clocks). Merging takes the union of the update sets.
- The user-visible value is the result of processing these updates in order, using arbitrary contract code.
This is overkill for simple last-writer-wins values, but it lets you support fairly general data types & arbitrary update functions, including ones that preserve application-specific invariants.
The Automerge CRDT library works like this already [1][2], but it only allows specific updates to JSON data. Sharing code via your contracts solves the hard part of generalizing that to arbitrary data & updates.
[1] https://automerge.org/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04263
1. sanity • OP
Groxx
22d
Neat. I've been wanting to see WASM-defined network behavior like this for a while (yay arbitrary consistency algorithms!), I'll have to explore it in more detail :)
(the main thing I've been wanting to try: rather than graphql, send a WASM blob along with your request to a server, and just run it to filter fields in the response / pipeline requests / define "fail if any err / pair errors with requests" for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)
1. sanity • OP
  12d
alun
62d
Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.
For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.
1. sanity • OP
  42d
  Our intention is that Freenet will only consume surplus resources, but we plan to build a reputation system that could have a notion of "karma" that is earned by providing resources to the network. This karma could be used to gate access to resources, for example like a VIP chat room on River.
  So there are a lot of possibilities but for now users are motivated by a desire to see the network succeed, and that seems to be a sufficient motivator at our current scale.
aleqs
102d
Very cool project!
> We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.
Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
1. sanity • OP
  12d
  > Very cool project!
  Thank you!
  > Where can I learn more about this?
  If you don't mind watching a video I gave this talk back in March that should be fairly comprehensive: https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0?si=R4ifrsfEUJfvjDPx
  If you would prefer an article I recommend: https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/
  > How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
  It's very closely related, you can view Freenet contract state as a CmRDT, where the details of the merge operation are specified in the webassembly contract.
gustavus
12d
In my early days of technology tinkering when I was young I was always interested in security, and one day I stumbled upon freenet, and my world changed.
It was amazing and led me to get far more acquainted with the cyberpunk scene. It was this alternative separate internet from what the rest of the world saw with all of the good and bad that brought.
I've been meaning to set it up again and get back into it. I will say for everyone pining for the Internet of yesteryear freenet is it. Go and explore it it is everything the 90's Internet was like, super slow, crazy unhinged nerds all over the place random collections of links, crazy.
Thanks for all you've done Ian
Edit: Btw what is the best way to support the project and get involved?
1. sanity • OP
  02d
EGreg
02d
Big fan of this project. Three years ago, I interviewed Ian Clarke about his upcoming Freenet rewrite. He's the original "OG" of decentralized content networks. We go into detail regarding its architecture on the podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
nurumaik
62d
I think better approach for "ghost keys" would be requiring X amount of crypto to be sent to 0x0 (burning). Current implementation (requiring donation to freenet) basically gives freenet foundation infinite reputation (including any other potential project that would accept ghost keys as identity), kinda breaking the decentralization aspect
1. sanity • OP
  52d
  Ghost keys will ultimately be just one of a menu of options for bootstrapping reputation in a decentralized reputation system. They have the advantage of simplicity, anonymity, and helping to fund the project, but as you correctly point out - they are centralized.
  A cryptocurrency-based solution like you suggest will undoubtedly be one of a menu of reputation bootstrapping options that will develop over time.
mhitza
11d
What are the current limitation of this system? Slow bootstrapping, high latency, large disk usage?
Is there a solution, or ideas, for DNS equivalents? I know the I2P approach (and remember that GNUNet had some unique approach as well), which can be workable in practice with "trusted registrars" as jump hosts. Name resolution feel even more important to solve in decentralized web.
How can anonymity be built on top of this system?
For ghost keys issuance, like with other privacy products, I'd really like to be able to buy redeem coupons in real life, not through stripe and all other online payment providers.
1. sanity • OP
  01d
adamfisk
31d
Exciting to see Freenet innovating so much, Ian! I haven't really dug in too deep but love that it's in Rust. What's it look like over the wire? How conspicuous is it in the face of, say government censors who can see and control every packet?
Been chatting a lot with the HolePunch/Tether folks, and their work is impressive, particularly the use of the DHT for all signaling, Tailscale-inspired (aka Birthday Paradox) NAT hole-punching, an entire JavaScript runtime, etc. I'm curious about some of those details in Freenet. In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?
Either way, congrats!
1. adamfisk
  11d
rohitsriram
91d
Decentralized web has been a pipe dream forever but group chat actually working in practice is more convincing than anything they could have shown. Real time sync was always the hard part.
Curious about mobile though, you mentioned iOS is the main blocker because of wasm restrictions. Is the plan to run the peer on desktop and have mobile just connect to it, or are you expecting people to run a full peer on Android?
1. Gigachad
  71d
  The hard part imo was not being exposed to, or unknowingly redistributing illegal content. They claim this new freenet solves this but the details on how weren't super clear.
soundworlds
02d
Looks very interesting! I stumbled across your webpage a few months ago while looking into the state of peer-to-peer. Glad to see p2p projects are still active.
dariosalvi78
32d
I wrote a short University essay on Freenet in 1998 I think it was... I may still have the document somewhere. Good stuff, very pioneer!
1. duskwuff
  22d
  Unfortunately, this is an effectively unrelated project.
dgudkov
02d
It's refreshing to see people doing something conceptually interesting outside of the LLM domain.
toomim
01d
How do you compare this to the effort in https://braid.org, which is also a decentralized web, which adds subscriptions that can operate in a tree (or DAG) of reactive state, each with its own validator and supporting different media types, and merging with merge-types?
Freenet seems to not interoperate with the existing WWW as much, while at the same time giving more specification on a specific routing and WASM validator. The existing WWW and Braid leave those decisions up to each particular host/authority to decide.
endofreach
12d
Very interesting. I have been working on something quite some time, where something like this would play a very crucial role, but i never got around to really thinking about how to implement everything. And as I have still a lot of work to do on my project, that would utilize something like freenet, i am very eager to dive into your work. Just wanted to write this as some form as appreciation for your work.
I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?
Great work it seems, so far. I will yet have to really look through it all. Congratulations on this.
1. sanity • OP
  02d
dharmatech
42d
I definitely think we should be exploring decentralized approaches to services we use.
I also would like to see an emphasis on local-first approaches.
This experiment, in the spirit of UNIX, composes git and text files to form a social network:
https://github.com/dharmatech/9social
Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI
1. sanity • OP
  32d
treyd
02d
This is awesome. I rotated some ideas like this in my head a while ago but never had the motivation to put it together. Happy to see more types of protocols like this.
sim04ful
02d
There's also https://internetcomputer.org/
analogpixel
12d
ELI5, how is this different than the internet?
1. sanity • OP
  02d
  Imagine an internet that is fundamentally decentralized, where your online presence isn't at the mercy of a company like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.
  Think of it as going back to the Internet's decentralized roots.
rcakebread
02d
I wrote a web browser for Freenet called Snarfzilla. I guess it may have been the first web browser for "the dark web". [1]
I integrated "Fair Tunes", which tried to pay musicians for mp3 files, long before any label was selling mp3's.
(Edit: I just remembered Freshmeat automatically rejecting Snarfzilla because they were so sick of projects ending in *zilla. The owner thought it was cool and added it after I emailed. No idea why I used 'snarf'. I've never said it out loud.)
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/snarfzilla/
eddy-sekorti
12d
Looks very intersting, congratulations for the launch and wishing you good Luck!
1. sanity • OP
  02d
  Thank you!
oezi
12d
Is there any way to run this in the browser rather than downloading an app?
1. sanity • OP
  02d
  Not currently, but installation is very quick - the binary itself is just 10MB.
  I am thinking about making a public proxy available so people can try the network itself without installing it, but we've made installation as quick and painless as possible.
sometimelurker
01d
related wiki links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-LAFS
iamkrazy
01d
Serious question: how do you prevent/remove nefarious things like CSAM?
andai
12d
Can you tell me about the old Freenet? I've read up on Wikipedia and it seems to be very much in the line with the 90s/2000s p2p file sharing software. Except that you can store stuff on other people's computers and it's encrypted?
Which then led to people storing Bad Stuff, and this is somehow addressed in the new version? (I also read some stuff about friends and trust in the previous one, but haven't looked into properly.)
I think understanding the old one and the issues it ran into would be helpful for understanding the context, and the motivations for the changes.
Or to put it very bluntly: what is this, why should I care, and why not just use the old one?
Thanks
1. sanity • OP
  02d
maelito
42d
Can this be used to sync the data of an app from mobile to desktop without a server ? And vice-versa.
1. sanity • OP
  32d
  In principle but we don't yet support mobile except experimentally, in part due to mobile OS restrictions (eg. iOS apps can't embed webassembly).
[deleted]
02d
[deleted]
omoikane
02d
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469711 - Ian Clarke explains the next generation of Freenet [video] (2023)
hbarka
52d
Is this similar to how Napster worked?
1. sanity • OP
  22d
  Yes in the sense that users pool resources for the network, but no in the sense that Napster relied on a centralized database of content - whereas Freenet is entirely decentralized.
  Also Freenet is much more general, you could think of Napster like a shared hard drive, whereas Freenet is like a shared computer capable of running decentralized applications like group chat, social networks, search engines, etc.
trinsic2
01d
It seems like downvoting brigading is happening quite a bit on this post on a lot of replies.
AlexWasHeree
01d
Interesting
Ember_Wipe
01d
[dead]
daohieu91
02d
[dead]
hoxihan
01d
[dead]
chris_explicare
01d
[dead]
Aldipower
02d
We had too much Gnutella. I am in search for a locus to us. Now. SCNR