Freenet

When free speech dies, we need a place to organize.

Freenet is a censorship resistant, distributed p2p-publishing platform.

Too technical? Let’s improve that: Freenet is the internet's last, best hope for Freedom. Join now:

It lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish “freesites”, chat on forums and even do microblogging, using a generic Web of Trust, shared by different plugins, to avoid spam. For really careful people it offers a “darknet” mode, where users only connect to their friends, with which it is very hard to detect that they are running freenet.

The overarching design goal of freenet is to make censorship as hard as technically possible. That’s the reason for providing anonymity (else you could be threatened with repercussions - as seen in the case of the wikileaks informer from the army in the USA), building it as a decentral network (else you could just shut down the central website, as people tried with wikileaks), providing safe pseudonyms and caching of the content on all participating nodes (else people could censor by spamming or overloading nodes) and even the darknet mode and enhancements in usability (else freenet could be stopped by just prosecuting everyone who uses it, or it would reach too few people to be able to counter censorship in the open web).

I don’t know anymore what triggered my use of freenet initially, but I know all too well what keeps me running it instead of other anonymizers:

I see my country (Germany) turning more and more into a police-state, starting with attacks on p2p, continuing with censorship of websites (where infrastructure created to block child porn is now used to block websites of climate activists)* and leading into directions I really don’t like.

And in case the right for freedom of speech dies, we need a place where we can organize to get it back and fight for the rights laid out in our constitution (the Grundgesetz).

When free speech dies, we need a place to organize.

And that’s what Freenet is to me.

A technical way to make sure we can always organize acting by section 20 of our constitution (german link): the right to oppose everyone who wants to abolish our constitutional order.

PS: New entries on my site are also available in freenet (via freereader: downloads RSS feeds and republishes them in freenet).

PPS: If you like this text, please redent/retweet the associated identi.ca/twitter notices so it spreads:

• https://twitter.com/ArneBab/status/21217822748

• Also see Freenet described by Steve.