The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine.
Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.
We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.
This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.
Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.
If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].
[1] https://github.com/freenet/river
[2] https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/
I wonder though, what is your idea of a future, where freenet plays an important role in most peoples lives?
Great work it seems, so far. I will yet have to really look through it all. Congratulations on this.
It was an ivory tower decision which was announced on the mailing list without prior discussion.
The old team did not agree, yet it was forced through by a decision of the "board".
The "board" was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.
https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...
The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore, while the old one continues to exist and is maintained at:
For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.
It was amazing and led me to get far more acquainted with the cyberpunk scene. It was this alternative separate internet from what the rest of the world saw with all of the good and bad that brought.
I've been meaning to set it up again and get back into it. I will say for everyone pining for the Internet of yesteryear freenet is it. Go and explore it it is everything the 90's Internet was like, super slow, crazy unhinged nerds all over the place random collections of links, crazy.
Thanks for all you've done Ian
(the main thing I've been wanting to try: rather than graphql, send a WASM blob along with your request to a server, and just run it to filter fields in the response / pipeline requests / define "fail if any err / pair errors with requests" for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)
> We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.
Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
and when played out of order, it's guaranteed to resolve to foobaz eventually or immediately, depending on when messages are received
when you encounter the scenario of a fork, there's usually a fork resolution rule, e.g. D: { "prev_hash": "<hash of B>", "content": "foobazbar" }
to resolve C vs D, sort lexicographically, choose direction of sort order and pick first
When you have non-continuous data due to messages dropping, e.g. you have B and perhaps an E that builds on C, you can either use the same lexicographic rule, or make the hash basis a combination of timestamp and hash, so you get temporality and lineage.
As for deletes, you have either the single set approach of simply making the message content empty and that _is_ the delete, or you have the 2-phase sets, where there exists an add set and a delete set.
Quite a few ways to approach it, but commutativity can be readily preserved.