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.
Exciting 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?
Author here, but one piece I didn't dive into is CEF vs CDP. Things like Browserbase use Chrome Devtools Protocol, which is useful for manipulating the browser for some use cases, but it's also detectable in a variety of ways. Wick Pro uses Chrome Embedded Framework with tie-ins at the C++ layer. So it is actual Chrome, not a detectable protocol manipulating Chrome. Some details at https://getwick.dev/blog/cef-vs-cdp, but I'm curious if other folks have experience in this area or thoughts in general.
Wick is also local-first. So it's designed for local agents crawling successfully vs larger scale crawls simply because we haven't built out the infra.
Theoretically this is true, but in practice it's not. Most p2p services rely on the global internet in some way. The BitTorrent DHT, for example, is unlikely so self-heal in the event of a completely inaccessible global internet.
Things like HolePunch have a lot of potential here, but you'd need an Iran-only DHT, and it's just not deployed at scale.
You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They are not naive to the risks of the work nor are they naive to the technical threats facing the software. In fact, the opposite is true. Western VPN companies are very much naive because the risks their users face are much less severe, and at a technical level they don't require anywhere near the same level of sophistication. They're primarily just WireGuard and OpenVPN, which are trivial for censors to block.
Tor is great, and they do great research on censorship circumvention, but it isn't used at any significant scale in these countries.
@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because:
1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources
2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restricting payments (Alipay, WeChatPay, etc)
The immediate response would be: "If the problem is so difficult, how can it be solved if not be well-known, well-established providers?"
The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.