the _point_ of freenet was that you could anonymously share/store information. For better or worse, that was the point of it. It also drove the UX and tradeoffs for the network.

It was slower than Kazaa/bittorrent, but it was far harder to work out who was shareing what. (if memory serves it also chunked files up so they weren;t on the same machine, but that could be me misremembering)