I'm very glad to hear that—the anonymity of the original Freenet has led to it being a very unsavory place that was more well known for CSAM then anything positive or useful. As an outsider, it sounds like this new direction is the right choice for Freenet to try and attract new users and fulfill the team's original goals.
Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for, and freely speaking can result in all kinds of repressions.
And even without agreeing on whether people should be anonymous on the Internet,
it could be agreed that replacing a software which guards against a certain threat model (repressions) with one which does not,
without changing the name, is not exactly a wise decision.
The new Freenet will support the creation of anonymity systems as services on top of it, which is much better architecturally than tying the platform to one approach to anonymity as I did when I designed the original Freenet.
We will also have a decentralized reputation system that will protect people from being exposed to unsavory or illegal content, a common criticism of the old Freenet architecture.
less anonymity and a reputation system?
I know you designed the thing, and that was a great effort, but what a miss when compared to the vast majority of freenet users priorities.
I wouldn't describe it as "less anonymity", it's more that the new Freenet gives applications and users different choices about anonymity depending on their requirements. I don't see how more choice is a bad thing - versus forcing the same (imperfect) solution on everyone as in my original design.
Similarly, reputation systems aren't inherently coercive, they're more analogous to spam filtering or trust heuristics, mechanisms for deciding what to prioritize - but ultimate control always remains with the user.
> Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for
I’m not a fan of “think of the children“ arguments but the Internet cannot actually be a complete free for all and “freedom of speech” is not some magic shield that overrides all other ethical considerations. CSAM is not a particularly high bar and frankly if you want people to throw in with you then you can’t brush it off so lightly.
> I’m not a fan of “think of the children“ arguments
Yet you're making one.
> the Internet cannot actually be a complete free for all
Yet in many important ways, it is.
As much as publishers would like to shut down Scihub, it exists. The Pirate Bay famously persists. Nation states with entirely opposed legal systems connect and interoperate to at least some degree.
Scihub and The Pirate Bay are not at all anonymous, aggressively police for CSAM, and rely on reputation systems.
North Korean Internet will solve ip4 address exhaustion.
Dude it’s CSAM what are we even doing here.
> Extremely depraved things are not the only thing to use freedom of speech for.
And yet, it's materially all anonymity is actually for in practice, within a margin of error. Tor - mostly crime & CSAM. Crypto - mostly crime. 4chan - mostly degeneracy, some crime. Faceless Corporations - used for crime, and things that should be crimes, but hide under other names.