Think of freenet as anonoymous Gnutella
Source?
It's become satisfyingly fast for me over the past years.
> only supporting static documents instead of interactive (tcp) servers.
You can develop dynamic services on Freenet just fine.
It is just done in a different fashion technically:
Instead of hosting the software on a server, and running scripts on the clients' web browser, there is no server/client model. It's true peer-to-peer: Every client is its own server, and the code runs there.
I.e. users install "plugins" for Freenet, and those use the network primitives which Freenet provides to establish dynamic connections and render dynamic content.
So you can have dynamic HTML if you want to. It's just not served by the sites you visit. Instead, things are developed "once and for all" as plugins for all sites and users to use.
So it's kinda like "forced true decentralization". You can't just shove JavaScript down the throat of random visitors of your site. You actually have to go through the effort of making your site's service a real application which people voluntarily choose to run.
>Source?
>It's become satisfyingly fast for me over the past years.
My understanding is that freenet (At best) scales logarithmically where Tor scales mostly constantly. Scalability and (current) speed are not the same thing. However saying poorly was probably unfair, I should have said is less scalable than Tor is.
> You can develop dynamic services on Freenet just fine. > [...]
What you're describing is how I would define a static page (plus client side scripting). Which works fine in many use cases. But you can't ssh into some server over freenet, or plop your php site from the world wide web unchanged, on to freenet. You can do these things with Tor, along with (at least in principle) all the "true p2p" things you mentioned you can do with freenet (Obviously in the Tor case you need to have your server always going and have sufficient capacity). That's why I would describe Tor as more flexible in terms of the things you can "host" (for lack of a better word). But the flexibility comes at a cost, and in exchange for being less flexible, freenet has a lot of interesting properties that tor does not have.
It at least aims to be so :)
As with any anonymous p2p network you need to know:
Your level of privacy depends on your threat level. If the government is after you, they may very well know exploits. If you just want privacy from corporations for perfectly legal reasons then you might be fine.
> How does it compare to Tor and i2p?
See "How is Freenet different to Tor?" here:
https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html
TL;DR: Freenet is a self-contained *storage* network. Tor is a *communication* network, I2P as well. The latter is also self-contained. However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down.
Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. If by endpoints you mean 'relays', those are not 'central servers'. If you mean directory authorities, then yes, those are centralized.
With that said, I'm still not sure what you mean by 'they do not provide censorship-resistance.'
They absolutely have and do provide censorship resistance.
No, it's not false AFAIK :)
By 'endpoint' I mean what an address on those networks actually *addresses*.
Both a Tor-address (a .onion hostname, or a regular web address if you use Tor to access one), and an I2P-address, are essentially similar to an IP-address in terms of being the address of a *machine*.
They are anonymized, but the data is routed to the very specific machine which the address is of.
A Freenet address on the other hand is the address of a *file* - basically a hash.
So in Tor and I2P, even though the machine behind the address is anonymous, you can still DoS it because you have the address of the specific machine where the data is at.
In Freenet, you cannot DoS the machine because the address does *not* tell the network where the file is stored. It only tells what file you get. Any machine on the network can serve the file to you!
And in fact, if you try to DoS a file by requesting it very frequently on Freenet, it will instead be distributed MORE on the network: Machines along the path where the data is routed will cache the file.
That's what provides the censorship resistance.
It offers a "darknet" mode where you manually add peers by exchanging cryptographic keys with them.
The connections to those peers are fully encrypted then and thus very difficult to block because you can't detect Freenet with merely packet inspection anymore.
Besides, the ability to censor individual Tor sites is *bad enough* already IMHO.
However, I'm asking about your description of Tor and I2P
>However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down.
This is technically incoherent, and I'm not sure what you mean by it.
As far as I'm aware, at no point does your TCP traffic from your tor client connect to a 'central server'. I'm not familiar enough with I2P to comment.