Since apparently there are freenet folks watching and participating, it would be interesting to know what SAFE could learn from them.
What design features would the FREEnet have done different if they could start over? What is the most useful and annoying parts of their systems?
How many of us SAFE enthusiast have downloaded and played with FREEnet? What did we like, what didnāt we like? Why do we think SAFE will be different? Chances are good that FREEnet did what they did for good reason, and if there is something that we donāt like it FREEnet, we need to make sure it is engineered around in SAFEā¦
There are a lot of discussions like DNS where things seem to be pretty up in the air, (or kinda left out for the market to solve later) Other projects may have come to various conclusions that might be helpful for SAFEā¦
As an aside, I plan on forking safe_dns and refactoring it to use the Petname System as described here - allowing multiple DNS systems to be built on top and chosen to be added or ignored by the user. But thatās still just a proposal and not set in stone.
I am very interested to follow this thread, as learning from past experience is one of the highest forms of learning.
I think the glaringly obvious thing for me is that (AFAIK), in order to have a true ādarknetā mode in Freenet, you need to be able to ātrustā another node. That is, you need to know exactly who you are communicating with to ensure that they arenāt law enforcement or another bad actor. If it works the way I understand it, then every leaf of a ātrusted node treeā is exposed to potential law enforcement or NSA hijacking.
SAFE doesnāt work that way. No trust is required; the system self heals and punishes bad node behaviour.
The second issue for me is the speed. I think that SAFE will be faster, and this is based purely on @dirvine 's assertions that we may see āfaster than disk accessā comms. Freenet is woefully slow compared to the general internet (I speak from experience). We still have to see how SAFE goes on this issue, though.
A lesson we could learn from Freenet is the appearance of child pornography. Iām no advocate of censorship, and will argue against any kind of infrastructure-level limiting of the type of information that appears on the network. But the fact is, itās actually quite difficult to access Freenet (at least through Frost), without coming across people asking about child porn and informing each other how to get it. Itās ok for me, I can ignore it. But I wouldnāt allow my children to use it; itās not a SAFE environment. And even though you still need to follow their links to find the boards that contain child porn, kids may get curious, and then potentially fall prey to these people themselves. The future internet must be configurable (by parents) to be SAFE for kids.
I think the solution to this is built into SAFE, at least potentially. The app-focused approach should allow app devs to be able to screen out this sort of thing, effectively removing it from system-wide visibility. Itāll still be there, but it will be hard(er) for children to come across it by accident. We shouldnāt āpoliceā everything, but I think app devs will be able to mitigate this kind of thing quite easily.
