wiki

ub.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Projects Developing dynamic stuff is taking so long because it is a complex endeavor: On the regular Internet, censorship happens by "look up who owns the IP, go to their address, remove the computer." Since this is not possible on Freenet as everyone is anonymous, censorship will happen by denial of service: For example forum systems would be spammed to death to get rid of unwanted content. Thus the architecture of censorship-resistant systems has to be reinvented from scratch, you can't just take a regular forum system and stick Freenet on top of it. It has to be decentralized to be resistant against DoS - there must not be Tor-alike central servers ("hidden sites" / .onion sites). Instead messages are stored across the whole network and replicated automatically if they are downloaded more often and thus need more bandwidth (the added redundance also makes them more censorship-resistant). And spam filtering need to be a first-class application, I have worked for years only on that. So the different architecture is the primary pitfall which many projects which decided "Freenet is too old, we're gonna build this from scratch with nice Javascript etc." fell into IMHO: First it's "we'll develop a regular app, we can bolt Tor onto it later", then they realize that the threat-model is so different that this is just not possible and the projects never become anonymous/censorship-resistant. So privacy needs to be built in from the start. Luckily, Freenet did that right (even though it was the first anti-censorship + privacy network!), and I don't mind that it's taking decades to develop because of the extended threat model: That's still better than being one of wheel-reinventing post-Freenet projects which then abandon the privacy idea in the end anyway, or postpone it forever.