In what ways does maidsafe improve upon freenet?

Far far more advanced — it splits data into chunks, encrypts it end to end, uses a Kademlia DHT which removes the IP addresses after the first hop so no one can find all the nodes, has consensus about the files and their evolution, and uses later cryptographic primitives like BLS keys etc. etc.

https://safenetforum.org/t/maidsafe-vs-freenet-i2p-ipfs/9409

None of the points you note here are advantages of maidsafe over Freenet — except maybe the later crypto primitives (though these aren’t necessarily safer).

But your link has one important point: "Freenet…is more a exchange and communication system instead [of] a data management system as Maidsafe".

The goal of Freenet is censorship resistant communication. That is its focus and the origin of almost all its features.

Why don't you consider them advantages?

I’ll go through them:

- it splits data into chunks, encrypts it end to end → same as Freenet.

- uses a Kademlia DHT which removes the IP addresses after the first hop so no one can find all the nodes → same for Freenet, except that Freenet has many additional privacy protections in the protocol and uses node-locations on a ring like Chord, but with an inferred small word structure that allows efficient routing without the need to be able to connect to anyone but your direct peers.

- has consensus about the files and their evolution → Freenet has signed, user-controlled keyspaces, so no consensus is needed. Lifetime is given by access (what people access is kept alive) without actually having to track accesses, which is much safer for privacy than a consensus algorithm.

Freenet is not affiliated with Maidsafe.

That’s correct!

Nice to see they implemented [1] it in a much better language than Freenet or I2P - Rust.

[1] https://github.com/maidsafe