Sorry but that must have been a bug or misconfiguration on your machine:
It should connect to the network by default without any tinkering.
Perhaps you didn't pay close attention to the first-time wizard and told it to only connect to manually chosen peers instead of connecting to random strangers? If you then don't add peers manually you won't have any connections.
> The GUI didn't make much sense, I couldn't work out where I was meant to go to browse content.
The default feature is browsing HTML content just like on the regular web.
By default it ships some bookmarks to "index" sites, i.e. sites which list links to plenty of other sites.
Those bookmarks should be right at the main page of the UI at http://127.0.0.1:8888
It's been too long for me to remember the exact details but if I couldn't work out how to make it run as a long time linux and p2p user, I can't see how the average user could.
Perhaps you can update your topmost post to mention that?
The official installers are here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/download.html
Thanks for clarifying though!
This type of uncaring about the user experience nonsense is exactly the type of issue that the person you’re replying to is sharing about their experience.
Though distro-packaging in Guix is still far superior to a flatpak, because it gives the freedom of flatpaks but integrates much better.
I then went to the IRC, reddit and wiki and ether got nothing back or nothing useful. Eventually gave up.
Vs something like IPFS where you just run the software and localhost becomes your portal to the network and you can even access files as a basic file path via the FUSE mount.
Edit: Clarifying that I was using an unofficial build for freenet which may have made it harder.