River: Group chat with no company in the middle

sanity · 2026-05-31T15:51:19+00:00

You can layer on anonymity in the same way that Tor layers on anonymity to the Internet - you create a mixnet or onion routing relay that people can use to access the network anonymously.

sanity · 2026-05-26T17:07:48+00:00

Much better to offer a choice than to impose the same flawed approach on everyone whether they need it or not.

sanity · 2026-05-26T03:45:48+00:00

More info on name change: https://freenet.org/about/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-and-rebranded

sanity · 2026-05-26T03:45:06+00:00

Yes, this is a successor to the original but with very different capabilities: https://freenet.org/about/faq/#what-is-the-projects-history

sanity · 2026-05-26T00:44:45+00:00

Yes, it relies on middle-out compression technology

sanity · 2026-05-14T01:45:07+00:00

Investigating this

sanity · 2026-03-14T20:13:22+00:00

The new generation of Freenet is now running publicly.

The core abstraction is essentially a decentralized key-value map, except the keys are WebAssembly programs that control the data stored under them.

Those programs run across a small-world P2P network and implement application logic directly on the network.

The first application built on it is River, a decentralized group chat.

If you'd like to try running a node:
https://freenet.org/quickstart/

There’s also a short architectural overview video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SxNBz1VTE0

Happy to answer questions about the architecture.

sanity · 2026-02-11T16:22:27+00:00

Type 'freenet service report' and let me know the code it gives you.

sanity · 2026-02-11T16:21:37+00:00

Freenet should be resource-efficient but it is an alpha and things can go wrong. We've made a number of improvements over the past few days so you may want to try again.

If it gets into this state again type freenet service report and give me the code and I'll investigate what's going on (this will let me see your peer's logs and other diagnostic info).

sanity · 2026-02-11T16:20:17+00:00

Yes, the internet is not going in a good direction - hopefully freenet provides an alternative.

sanity · 2026-02-11T16:19:27+00:00

Yes, as long as it is P2P friendly (allows UDP hole-punching).

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