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Freenet is a decentralized peer-to-peer network designed to circumvent government censorship and corporate control of the internet by replacing centralized servers with a distributed system where data ownership and algorithmic transparency are restored to users.
- Centralized servers in data centers are single points of failure that governments can pressure to censor content or manipulate recommendation algorithms
- Decentralized peer-to-peer architecture with transparent, auditable contracts makes it impossible for any single entity to control or censor the network
- Freenet restores user agency by allowing individuals to control their own data, choose their own recommendation algorithms, and participate in a network where interoperability is the default
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The UK government intends to shape YouTube recommendation algorithms to promote what they consider trusted sources of information, demonstrating hidden manipulation of information distribution.
“the UK has also recently been talking about their intention to uh, shape shape the YouTube recommendation algorithm uh to promote what they would consider trusted sources of information.”
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.
“you could contrast this with uh any any number of companies that, for example, have recommendation engines uh and you have no idea how these recommendation engines work. You know you've no idea how they work internally. And so, you would have no idea, for example, if a government was pressuring uh that company to modify the recommendation engine with the goal of uh manipulating you.”
Freenet's principle of keeping private data on hardware that users control contrasts starkly with the current era where virtually nothing is stored on user-controlled hardware and everything is stored in the cloud.
“one of the principles that Freenet uses is that your private data should stay on hardware that you control. And this of course is in stark contrast to this era of where everything is stored in the cloud, virtually nothing is stored on hardware that users control.”
The fundamental problem enabling government control of the internet is that every app runs on centralized servers in data centers controlled by corporations that are subject to government pressure and manipulation.
“a big part of the problem is that every app on the internet runs on servers that are sitting in data centers that are controlled by a corporation that is uh that is subject to pressure uh and manipulation by governments.”
Around 2007, tech companies decided they all needed to build APIs and everything should be an API, but they shut them down one to two years later either because they enabled spammers or because they were helping competitors.
“I think the there was a there was a brief moment in time. I think I would pin it at around uh 2007 where all of all of these tech companies decided they needed to build APIs and everything should be an API and they all did build APIs and then shut them down one to two years later for one of two reasons. The first is it made life a little bit too too easy for spammers and other people doing malicious stuff. And the second reason they shut it down is uh because it was helping people compete with their business models in some case.”
Git was originally designed to be decentralized with different people maintaining their own repositories, but became more centralized with GitHub and similar forges.
“the original Git's original design was actually decentralized where different people could maintain uh their own repositories on their own computers and it made it easy for them uh to share changes and then get kind of like a lot of things got a lot more centralized with the advent of GitHub and other similar forges.”
Freenet eliminates single points of failure that enable government censorship and manipulation by decentralizing the network so no single peer controls the entire network and no servers are centrally managed.
“Freenet has There are no servers. Uh with Freenet, you just have peers and no single peer is super important or controls the entire network. So, by decentralizing the network and getting rid of these servers which are centrally managed and controlled, Freenet makes it a lot more difficult. It eliminates these single points of failure that make it easier for governments to apply pressure and manipulate what people are uh doing um on the internet.”
By bundling data together with code that determines the data's behavior (an object-oriented philosophy), both delegates for private data and contracts for shared state in Freenet create systems where the code controlling data behavior is inseparable from the data itself.
“by bundling, it's almost like an object-oriented uh philosophy where you uh bundle the data together with the code that determines the data's behavior. And that applies both to delegates for private data and to contracts for uh shared state on the network.”
Freenet is very transparent because shared data and the rules governing it (business logic) are in public contracts that anyone can read and audit.
“one of the key ideas with Freenet is that Freenet is very transparent. Um the shared data in Freenet and the rules that govern how that shared data is uh modified, I guess you might call it the business logic, all of that is in public contracts that anyone can read and audit.”
The European Union fined X (formerly Twitter) 120 million euros for disinformation, demonstrating government regulatory power over speech classification.
“the European Union has fined X 120 million over uh, what they would call uh, disinformation.”
In the UK in 2023, there were 12,000 arrests for offensive online posts on platforms like X, which equals 33 arrests per day, demonstrating that Western governments are now actively prosecuting speech.
“in the UK in uh, 2023, there were 12,000 arrests uh for offensive online posts on platforms like X. That's 33 arrests per day.”
France arrested and charged the founder of Telegram for content that users posted on the platform, establishing liability for platform operators based on user-generated content.
“France uh, uh, arrested and charged the founder of Telegram uh for what its users were posting on the platform.”
California has passed a law mandating that operating system creators include age checks and effectively IPv4 verification in their operating systems and app stores, extending government control into the infrastructure layer.
“California has passed a law that will mandate that operating system creators uh, include uh, age checks and effectively I V IP verification into their operating systems and app stores.”
Decentralizing how people find information and are exposed to new information is critical for preventing manipulation.
“I think decentralizing how we find information, how we're exposed to new information is critical.”
The internet could be interoperable but isn't, often deliberately, because companies have incentives against interoperability.
“So, the internet is it could be interoperable, but it's not and often deliberately so.”
Between the mid-1990s and present, governments in Western countries have transitioned from a hands-off approach to the internet toward aggressive censorship and control, in stark contrast to their previous policy.
“between the mid-90s when, I would say, the internet originally kind of entered the mainstream and now, uh, governments, at least in the West, have taken a pretty relatively hands-off approach with the internet, um, which you could certainly contrast with, uh, countries like China and Iran and Saudi Arabia”
Despite Freenet's sophistication, the Freenet binary is only about 11 MB in size, which is one of the nice things about Rust as a language that allows you to do sophisticated systems work efficiently.
“Freenet, despite its uh sophistication, the binary is only about 11 MB. Uh which is kind of one of the nice things about Rust is that it lets you uh do that.”
Even though try.freenet.org is centralized, Freenet respects privacy and data ownership far more than most services by using client-side encryption.
“even though it's centralized, uh we go a lot further than most services in terms of uh uh in terms of uh respecting people's privacy and respecting ownership of uh their data. But, obviously the goal is to get them uh to get them to install Freenet and keep their private data on their own computer, which is the best place for it in in our opinion.”
The Freenet creator cannot be pressured to remove content because they lack the ability to do so, and this architectural inability to control the system actually protects the creator from pressure, allowing them to legitimately say 'we cannot do it.'
“somebody could put a gun to my head and demand that I remove something from Freenet and I simply wouldn't have the ability to do it. And that uh in a way that actually protects the creator of of the system because if you can't manipulate it then it's hard for people to pressure you to do that. You can legitimately say we simply can't do it.”
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.
“a critical idea with Freenet, and I think one of the things that made the World Wide Web uh particularly powerful is that and I the first one I can think of that gained widespread adoption is Gmail. Uh Gmail is uh a pretty sophisticated uh piece of software in its own right uh that's implemented in JavaScript. And so, when you go to Gmail, uh the Gmail website, you're actually downloading a piece of software to your browser, and then that piece of software in your browser controls your allows you to interact with the centralized services that store your emails”
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.
“X, I think, they've several times they've announced that they're going to open source uh their core algorithm and they've kind of open sourced some stuff, but then it it ends up staying out of date for months and it's hard to believe that they're not updating their code code uh base in that space of time. And I think they recently said that they're going to uh release the code to their algorithm again, but the problem is that you've got really no way to know that the code that's actually running on their servers is the same code that they've published on GitHub.”
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.
“Um I think because group chat is something that can be useful even if you're just doing it with four or five friends. Um whereas email is something where it's it to be useful, it's got to be a lot more pervasive. Um and so we focused on group chat as our kind of initial stake in the sand because it it kind of scales down as well as scaling up in terms of you know, you could you can have just two people using River and it's useful to both of them.”
Freenet solves the contract discovery routing problem by treating it as a supervised learning problem using the Renegade algorithm, a K-nearest neighbors algorithm with a learned metric implemented in Rust.
“the way that Freenet solves this problem is it actually treats it as a supervised learning problem with machine learning. And we use a uh supervised learning algorithm that I call Renegade that's uh it's been open source for years uh also implemented in Rust. Uh Renegade is a K-nearest neighbors um uh learning algorithm with a learned uh metric.”
Many people are reluctant to install software from a nonprofit they haven't heard of, so Freenet created freenet.org/try to allow people to try Freenet without installation.
“a lot of people are reluctant to install software from a strange nonprofit they haven't heard of before. So we decided that we would try to give people way to onboard onto Freenet and to try Freenet out without actually having to install anything on their computers.”
The freenet.org/try mechanism is centralized but serves the goal of letting users try Freenet and eventually migrate to completely decentralized operation by installing Freenet locally and clicking 'move to my peer'.
“this mechanism, it's it's a little bit contradictory because we're all about decentralization, and of course this is this is a centralized mechanism, but the goal of this is is to give people the ability to try Freenet out and and maybe start using it before they go to the trouble of of installing it.”
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.
“delegates are really Freenet's approach to privacy. You could think of delegates as being a little bit similar to a web browser's local storage, but delegates are actually far more powerful because kind of like a contract, a delegate is actually WebAssembly code.”
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.
“it's very data efficient which would contrast it with something like a neural network where you need vast amounts of data to train them and that just wouldn't fly in in the circumstance.”
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.
“So all messages and uh most of the information in the room is encrypted using a symmetric encryption algorithm. Um the room owner uh determines what that encryption key is and then shares it with all of the members of the room uh using asymmetric cryptography uh to encrypt it so only they can read it.”
Despite River's encryption limitations, it protects the things users really care about being encrypted—message content and metadata—making it a reasonable approach.
“I think it's I think it's important to to kind of be transparent about this kind of limitation, although I would argue that the things that you really care about being encrypted, uh River is encrypting.”
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.
“your private data, when it's being stored on our uh try.freenet.org server, um that private data is encrypted at rest. So, when you initially go to this system, it'll create a private cryptographic key uh that is stored in your web browser. And so, if you're not actively using this service, we can't decrypt your private data. It's only decrypted when you actually use it and when your web browser provides uh its private key to our ser- server.”
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.
“uh River uh River takes uh uh I would say a less of aggressive approach, so if the if the private key leaks and somebody gets it that shouldn't have it, they will be able to read messages up until when that key is rotated, which could be uh up to a week.”
Freenet is designed as an operating system rather than a platform, implemented in Rust to optimize efficiency across all aspects including concurrency and thread pool management.
“Freenet is almost like an operating system. And so, um when we're designing Freenet, it's it's implemented in Rust, so it's kind of a low-level language, a systems programming language uh that allows you to uh allows your code to be very, very efficient. Uh it's very good in terms of concurrency and managing thread pools uh and all of that. So, um Freenet is really built kind of like an operating system in that every every aspect of it, we've tried to optimize it as much as possible.”
Unlike traditional web with centralized app stores, Freenet has no app store because there's no need for one; apps are just downloaded by browsers like websites.
“there's no there's no kind of there's nothing like an app store with Freenet any more than there's an app store with the World Wide Web. That's unnecessary.”
Freenet is fundamentally better than the current internet because every system built on Freenet is interoperable by default.
“one way in which I think Freenet is actually uh aside from the decentralization part, fundamentally better than the way the uh internet works today, is the fact that every system built on Freenet and every component of every system built on Freenet is interoperable by default.”
If an undersea cable degrades or goes down, Renegade will quickly detect that previously fast peers are now slower and adapt Freenet peer routing very quickly.
“let's say if uh particular I know may maybe a undersea cable uh goes down or gets degraded and certain peers that were really fast in the past are now slower. Renegade will figure that out very quickly and the individual Freenet peers will adapt to that in their routing very quickly.”
A key part of Freenet peers' work is helping other peers find contracts on the network by determining which peer will help find a contract fastest, similar to branch prediction in CPU design.
“an important part of what Freenet uh peers are actually doing typically is they are helping other peers find contracts on the network. So, my peer, if it's looking for a particular contract, it it's connected to a bunch of other peers in the network, and it will determine it'll say, "Well, okay, which of these other peers is going to help me find this contract fastest?" And though I I almost compare this to to the idea of branch prediction um in uh CPU uh design.”
Contracts can control who can use them and what capabilities they have, with different levels of permissions and authorization built into the contract code.
“100% yes. So so um it depends on what you mean by use, but let There's several layers. uh is contract is the code, right? It's the WASM with the state. Yeah. And it could it's a building block to something potentially bigger. Absolutely yes. So the contract So one of the things you you can modify the data that's stored in the contract and the contract itself decides who's authorized to do that.”
Ghost keys are a decentralized cryptographic CAPTCHA mechanism that verify someone is real, unlike regular CAPTCHAs which actually work.
“Ghost keys, which I haven't mentioned in this talk, but uh if you Google Freenet Ghost keys, you'll find uh some talks where I talk about them in detail. Um but Ghost keys are uh Think about Think of them as a decentralized cryptographic CAPTCHA mechanism. So, a way to verify that somebody is real. Uh they're not like CAPTCHAs that it actually works.”
Atlas is claimed to be the world's first truly decentralized search engine, designed to solve the problem of how people discover information on the internet.
“There's Atlas which is pretty interesting. Atlas is our discovery and search engine. Um I would say it's like maybe the world's first truly decentralized search engine Uh but you could kind of say that for almost for a lot of the stuff we're doing with Freenet.”
Atlas allows users to tell it to stop showing cute puppy videos if they're tired of them, empowering the user over the algorithm.
“just imagine instead of just kind of watching whatever videos YouTube happens to serve up to you, you can tell it like enough with the cute puppy videos. I'm I'm all cute puppied out. Um and so, it it really empowers the user.”
Using LLMs to create neutral descriptions eliminates SEO manipulation where people try to manipulate Google snippets to drive traffic.
“the beauty of that is that it kind of take the whole SEO thing where people are kind of trying to manipulate you into visiting your website based upon the snippets that appear on Google, that's all irrelevant because a large language model is just describing what these things are in a neutral way.”
Ghost keys can be combined with Harvest for reputation of a store, allowing verified identity mechanisms in decentralized marketplaces.
“That could be combined with something like Harvest for uh the reputation of a store.”
AI has made building on Freenet much easier—Freenet has made Claude code skills available that understand the complexity of building Freenet apps.
“AI has actually made that a lot easier. So, uh we've made uh Claude code skills available that understand all of the complexity of building of uh a Freenet app.”
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).
“back in February, uh, when I last spoke, uh, we have the various different parts of Freenet. So, we have contracts, which store shared data on the peer-to-peer uh network. Uh, we have delegates, which store private data on your own computer.”
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.
“River um I don't know if Has anyone Has anyone tried it yet? Oh oh hundreds of hands have gone up here. Um so, River's a a pretty standard group chat um if if you uh if you join it, the user interface will will be very familiar. Um and of course, because it's built on Freenet, there's no there's no company behind it. The the uh everything about the system is decentralized. Uh each room on Freenet Each room on River uh is its own Freenet contract.”
Delta allows users to build websites in Markdown with hyperlinks and embedded images, functioning as a decentralized blog platform.
“Delta, uh which it which is our kind of Squarespace or or um uh it's just it allows you to build websites in Markdown, and then you can have hyperlinks between these pages. Um and so, it's it's pretty simple. You can embed images, that type of thing. Um It's very good if you want to create a blog or something like that.”
In addition to web browser access, Freenet supports native applications like River CTL (command-line tool) that allow everything in the Freenet UI to be done from the command line and scripted.
“you don't you're not limited to just using Freenet through your web browser. You can also build native apps. So for example, we've got a command line tool called River CTL that means that from the command line anything you can do in the River user interface, you can do using this command uh line tool. And that's great news if you want to script things, if you want to uh get your favorite LLM to interact with River in various different ways.”
Since February, Freenet has built various applications on the platform including River (group chat), Delta (decentralized website builder like Squarespace), and Freenet Git (decentralized Git repository hosting).
“we've been building various different apps on top of the Freenet platform. Um so probably the most developed of those is called River which is a group chat app um that was working back in February but now it's got all kinds of features like private rooms, private messages etc”
River has all kinds of features like private rooms and private messages, is actively used, and even receives spam, which indicates network maturity.
“now it's got all kinds of features like private rooms, private messages etc. And that's actively used and you can play with it today and chat with people on it. We've We've even started to get spam on it which I guess is kind of a right of right of passage of sorts”
Users can visit freenet.org/try and in one click access the official River chat room in a web browser with nothing installed, and this works on phones.
“you can actually go to freenet.org/try and in another click you'll actually find yourself in the official river chat room for Freenet and it'll just run in your browser, nothing needs to be installed, it'll work on uh your browser, it'll work on your phone, uh anything like that.”
Delta CTL is a command-line tool for Delta that allows complete automation of website updates, enabling AI agents to manage content.
“And there's also a Delta CTL, so there's a command-line tool, so you can completely automate Delta. Uh you can have your AI agent updated or or do whatever you need to do.”
Renegade is available under the LGPL license, is implemented in Rust, and was designed to perform well with default settings without needing multivariate testing or tuning.
“if any of you need a good general-purpose supervised learning algorithm Renegade, I think it's under uh the LGPL license. Um and it's implemented in Rust and you're welcome to use it. My other design goal with Renegade is I just wanted a supervised learning algorithm that you didn't have to tune. That it just performed well with the default settings and you don't need to mess around with multivariate testing and and all of this kind of thing to get it working well.”
Raven is a prototype social network being built on Freenet as a truly decentralized alternative to Facebook or X.
“we've got Raven, which is also at a prototype stage. Raven is is a social feed. Think a truly uh decentralized 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.
“Um and Harvest is another uh system that's in early design. And Harvest, you could think of as it's a entirely decentralized Etsy. So, it allows people to to to buy and sell things.”
Freenet Mail is an email-like service on Freenet currently in pre-alpha and still being tested.
“So, uh we've got Freenet Mail, which is an email-like uh service running on Freenet. This is pre-alpha. We're still testing it. I mean, you you might get it working, but uh uh it it won't be easy.”
Freenet has one full-time developer (the speaker) and two part-time developers based in Spain, plus a community of volunteers building apps.
“I'm working on Freenet full-time and we have two developers uh based in Spain that are part-time and then we've got kind of a community of volunteers around that.”
Hundreds of people join Freenet River rooms every day who haven't been there before, showing positive adoption momentum.
“we're getting, you know, probably hundreds of people every day join the room that haven't join our River rooms uh that haven't been there before.”