Back in February, Freenet had working basic network components including contracts (which store shared data) and delegates (which store private data on user's own computer).

Companies like Google have recommendation engines that nobody outside Google knows how they work, making it impossible for users to detect if governments are manipulating them.

X (Twitter) has announced it will open source its core algorithm but then the code stays out of date, and there's no way to know if the code running on their servers matches the published code on GitHub.

Delegates are Freenet's approach to privacy and are similar to web browser local storage but more powerful because they are WebAssembly code that can make intelligent decisions about what requests to fulfill.

A critical idea that made the World Wide Web powerful is that sophisticated software like Gmail can be downloaded to a browser as JavaScript, allowing users to interact with centralized services.

Renegade is very data efficient compared to neural networks which require vast amounts of data to train, making Renegade suitable for Freenet's decentralized learning context.

Private rooms in River use symmetric encryption for all messages and metadata, with the room owner determining the encryption key and sharing it using asymmetric cryptography.

Raven is a prototype social network being built on Freenet as a truly decentralized alternative to Facebook or X.

Harvest is a decentralized marketplace in early design phase that allows people to buy and sell things, functioning as a completely decentralized alternative to Etsy.

Group chat is a better initial stake in the ground for Freenet adoption than email because group chat is useful with just four or five friends, while email needs pervasive adoption to be useful.

River is a standard group chat interface that looks familiar to users and is decentralized with no company behind it, with each room being a separate Freenet contract.

AI has made building on Freenet much easier—Freenet has made Claude code skills available that understand the complexity of building Freenet apps.

Despite River's encryption limitations, it protects the things users really care about being encrypted—message content and metadata—making it a reasonable approach.

Decentralizing how people find information and are exposed to new information is critical for preventing manipulation.

Freenet Mail is an email-like service on Freenet currently in pre-alpha and still being tested.

The internet could be interoperable but isn't, often deliberately, because companies have incentives against interoperability.

Ghost keys are a decentralized cryptographic CAPTCHA mechanism that verify someone is real, unlike regular CAPTCHAs which actually work.

Private data stored on try.freenet.org servers is encrypted at rest using a private cryptographic key stored in the user's web browser, so the server cannot decrypt data when not in use.

Freenet is very transparent because shared data and the rules governing it (business logic) are in public contracts that anyone can read and audit.

River takes a less aggressive approach to forward secrecy than Signal's double ratchet, allowing someone with a leaked symmetric key to read messages for up to a week until the key rotates.