alt Hacker NewsExciting to see Freenet innovating so much, Ian! I haven't really dug in too deep but love that it's in Rust. What's it look like over the wire? How conspicuous is it in the face of, say government censors who can see and control every packet?
Been chatting a lot with the HolePunch/Tether folks, and their work is impressive, particularly the use of the DHT for all signaling, Tailscale-inspired (aka Birthday Paradox) NAT hole-punching, an entire JavaScript runtime, etc. I'm curious about some of those details in Freenet. In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?
Either way, congrats!
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Without knowing too much about the drama discussed here, I think the bottom line is that the "old" Freenet was a bit on life support as far as I could tell and absolutely needed this kind of innovation from its founder.
Thank Adam, nice you see you!
> What's it look like over the wire?
Encrypted UDP, but likely identifiable based on timing etc - we're not trying to hide it right now - the focus is more on decentralization.
> In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?
Depends on what you mean by "fully". When peers first start up they need to connect to a "gateway", a freenet peer that can receive unexpected inbound UDP. But gateways are only required to introduce peers to the network, after the initial introduction they form new connections through the network.
Right now we run these introductory gateways but will decentralize it over time.