Decentralized web has been a pipe dream forever but group chat actually working in practice is more convincing than anything they could have shown. Real time sync was always the hard part.
Curious about mobile though, you mentioned iOS is the main blocker because of wasm restrictions. Is the plan to run the peer on desktop and have mobile just connect to it, or are you expecting people to run a full peer on Android?
The hard part imo was not being exposed to, or unknowingly redistributing illegal content. They claim this new freenet solves this but the details on how weren't super clear.
Every Tor relay redistributes CSAM daily, but nobody gets busted for running a Tor relay.
> nobody gets busted for running a Tor relay.
Citation needed? IIRC, the general advice for running a Tor relay is "don't, unless you want an endless supply of abuse complaints". So you'd require a jurisdiction that ignores abuse complaints.
That’s for an exit node. Relays only relay fully encrypted traffic within the Tor network so there is no way to know what was being accessed. They never connect to non Tor servers so they don’t get flagged as abuse.
Oh, you're right.
They got rid of anonymity, which makes this a trivial problem: Law enforcement takes care of it.
Now, whether giving up anonymity was worth it is a separate issue.
Realistically the only uses cases of this are illegal ones. It’s like Tor, you’re either using it because your government made everything illegal, or you’re using it for dark shit.
I'd be interested in it just for fun. Hosting a cool decentralized blog or something. And hosting stuff that is legal in my country but illegal in say Russia. I just don't want to host or transport anything that is illegal or objectionable to me.
On Hyphanet (the original Freenet) there’s been working group chat via a Hyphanet-backed IRC server for over a decade (the server is named FLIP, the first working version was released in 2013, developed purely on Freenet/Hyphanet).