News on Freenet

Ian Clarke Answers Your Questions About Freenet

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Clarke answers community questions about Freenet, covering topics from the project’s vision and technical architecture to its roadmap and future plans.

Self-Managing Communities: How River Handles Inactive Members

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Membership management is a deceptively hard problem in decentralized systems. In a centralized chat app, an admin can remove inactive users from a group. But in a decentralized system without servers, who decides when someone is no longer active? How do you enforce that decision across every peer without coordination? And how do you do it without clocks, which are notoriously unreliable in distributed systems?

River’s answer is message-based member lifecycle: your presence in a room’s member list is tied to whether you have recent messages. No messages, no membership entry. Send a message, and you’re back automatically. It’s a mechanism that falls naturally out of the constraints of decentralized systems — and it turns out to be a better model than what centralized apps do.

Freenet Lives! Real-Time Decentralized Applications at Scale

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Clarke presents “Freenet Lives!” at FUTO, demonstrating real-time decentralized applications at scale on Freenet, including live demos of the network dashboard and River group chat.

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River: Real-Time Group Chat on Freenet

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve reached an important milestone: real-time group chat between users on different machines, communicating through the Freenet network with sub-second message latency. The screenshot above captures the first live conversation—no servers, no federation, just peers.

A Proof of Concept

River is our test application for Freenet’s core capabilities. It’s very much a work in progress and not yet ready for general use, but it validates what we’ve been building toward: fully decentralized, scalable applications that feel responsive enough for real-time interaction.

Developer Meeting

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Attendees: Ian Clarke, Ignacio Duart

In this week’s core team meeting, we made significant progress on two fronts:

Update Propagation Over the Network
Updates are now successfully propagating across Freenet peers, a key milestone toward stable multi-node operation. Ignacio and Ector have been working together to finalize this, and although there may still be an edge case affecting update propagation through intermediary peers, once confirmed, we expect to release a new version shortly.

Weekly Developer Meeting

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Attendees

Ian Clarke
Ignacio Duart

Key Updates & Discussion Points

Network Connection Fixes
- Most issues preventing stable peer connections have been fixed.
- The network can now maintain multiple connections, resolving a previous issue where only two peers could connect at a time.
- The root cause was a combination of:
  - The gateway not waiting long enough before cleaning transient connections.
  - A logic bug in packet receipt handling that caused repeated transmission loops.
- A fix was implemented to send receipts after a time threshold, even if the packet count limit wasn’t met.
Remaining Network Issue

Weekly Developer Meeting

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s developer meeting highlighted steady progress toward Freenet’s upcoming release. Key milestones include successful testing of peer-to-peer connections, including hole-punching, which allows nodes to communicate seamlessly across firewalls. This feature is critical for maintaining decentralized connectivity and performed well during tests.

The team has implemented an automated configuration system, enabling nodes to download gateway settings directly, streamlining the setup process. Ignacio and Hector demonstrated scripts for quickly setting up nodes and gateways, simplifying deployment for developers and testers. Once released, most users will be able to get started with a single cargo install command.

Understanding Freenet's Delta-Sync

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Challenge of Consistency in Distributed Systems

Achieving consistency across distributed systems is a notoriously difficult problem. The key reason is that, in a distributed environment, multiple nodes can independently make changes to the same piece of data. When different nodes hold different versions of this data, deciding how to reconcile these differences without losing valuable updates or introducing conflicts becomes a complex challenge.

Traditional approaches often require coordination mechanisms, such as consensus algorithms (like Paxos or Raft), to ensure consistency. However, these methods can be resource-intensive, require high communication overhead, and often struggle with scalability, especially when dealing with frequent updates across many nodes. The famous CAP theorem even states that distributed systems can only guarantee two of three properties—Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance—at any given time, making it hard to achieve strong consistency while keeping a system always available and partition-tolerant.

Understanding Small World Networks

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the 1960s psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an influential experiment that revealed something amazing about human relationships. Milgram chose people at random in cities like Kansas and gave each a letter with the address of someone they didn’t know in Boston, Massachusetts. They were instructed to get the letter to that person but only by sending it to someone they know personally, who would send it to someone they know personally - and so on. Milgram repeated this letter-sending experiment nearly 200 times. On average, these letters reached their target in just six steps, this is where we get the term ‘six degrees of separation.’ Milgram’s findings demonstrated that despite the vastness of the world, most individuals are only a few links away from each other, highlighting the surprisingly small number of intermediaries connecting us all.

Weekly Dev Update - WebSocket Stability and Final Testing Nearing Completion

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This Week’s Progress
We focused on stabilizing network operations after recent updates. Most major issues have been resolved, but a key challenge remains with the WebSocket API:

WebSocket Connection Stability:
- Issue: WebSocket connections occasionally drop, particularly during contract updates. This may be due to the lack of a keep-alive mechanism or another issue with how the client handles connections.
- Next Steps: Investigating whether periodic ping messages can prevent these disconnections. The application and node will also be tested to ensure they handle connections robustly.
Remaining Bugs:

Weekly Dev Meeting - Final Bug Fixes, Simulations, and Live Testing Ahead of Release

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Current Progress:
- Significant cleanup has been done, focusing on resolving issues with the transport layer and dependencies.
- Transport layer is working well, and the remaining issues are expected to be fixed within the next few days.
- The handshake handler has been thoroughly tested, with only minor remaining issues that are actively being addressed.
- A new monitoring and logging tool is almost ready and will be integrated soon.
Next Steps:
- Larger network simulations will be conducted to test Freenet’s behavior with more peers.
- Live testing on a real network environment will verify peer-to-peer connectivity and hole punching.
- Final testing of key contracts (e.g., microblogging, mailing) is planned to ensure they work correctly, though some may be revisited after the initial release.
Release Timing:

Weekly Dev Meeting - Transport working well, progress on Freenet Chat

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Progress Overview:

Improved Connectivity: Recent changes have allowed peers to establish more connections, even when multiple gateways are involved. Although not fully complete, connectivity between peers is progressing well, and extensive testing will continue to ensure robustness.
UI Enhancements: A new UI is being developed to monitor and debug the network. This will aid in integration testing, making it easier to identify and fix issues in real-time, and will be helpful as we prepare for the release.
Network Operations Testing: Local testing of basic network operations (e.g., boot, update, subscribe) has shown positive results, with most issues resolved. The next focus is on addressing remaining test failures and improving reliability.

Challenges and Solutions:

Weekly Dev Meeting

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Key Achievements:

Transport Layer Improvements: The network joining through a gateway works fine with most errors resolved. Nodes are acquiring connections, and the retry mechanism ensures successful connections even when initial attempts fail.
Unit Test Success: Most transport layer unit tests are passing, with the system able to establish connections after retries. Random packet drop simulations highlight some intermittent failures, but overall functionality is stable.
Connection Debugging: Logs show nodes progressively acquiring connections over time. The team is working on cleaning up the test environment for better debugging.
State Synchronization: Currently, when peers update their state, the entire state is sent rather than just deltas. This approach is suboptimal, and the plan is to shift to delta updates after the initial release.

Remaining Tasks:

Finalizing the Gateway and Transport Logic:

Weekly Dev Meeting - Gateways and Peer Connections

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just a brief update this week as we work towards the alpha release.

Gateway Connection Handling

After a few more fixes, connections with gateways are now handled smoothly. Although transport may still fail sporadically, we now appropriately retry connections, which resolves many of the previous issues.

Regular Peer Connections

Regular peers can now connect with each other! While there is still some weirdness that we are investigating, the connections are finally working as expected.

Weekly Dev Meeting - Finalizing Peer Connections and Preparing for Alpha Release

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What’s Working:

Peer-to-Peer Connectivity: Gateways and peers can now successfully connect and communicate with each other. While there are still minor issues, the main structure is operational, and communication between nodes works as expected.
Message Transmission: Messages can be sent between peers, and errors that do occur generally resolve themselves as the system retries connections.
Unit Tests: Existing unit tests for peer connections are passing, indicating stability in fundamental network components.
Telemetry & Logging: Improved logging and monitoring tools have made debugging easier, and these tools will help spot issues quickly as the network grows.

Remaining Tasks:

Weekly Dev Meeting - Friday, August 30th, 2024

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Key Progress:

Major Refactor Completed:
- Refactor focused on initial connections between nodes via the gateway.
- Addressed numerous issues that were causing problems in the network.
- Integration testing has been improved, leading to faster feedback for changes.
Integration Testing Improvements:
- Fixed various errors in integration code that were causing issues during testing.
- Adjustments have sped up the testing process significantly, allowing for quicker iterations.

Current Blockers:

Transport Layer Issues:
- There is a problem with the handshake process between the gateway and peers.
- The gateway and peers are not correctly syncing on the use of symmetric and asymmetric keys during communication.
- Ignacio is currently diagnosing this issue, which appears to be the last major blocker.

Other Developments:

Ghost Keys: Building Cypherpunk Reputation Systems with Ian Clarke of Freenet

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this interview, Michael from FUTO sits down with Ian Clarke to discuss the revolutionary concept of Ghost Keys. They explore how these anonymous, verifiable identities could address some of the Internet’s foundational flaws and delve into the future of decentralized, Cypherpunk-inspired reputation systems.

Also available on

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Introducing Ghost Keys

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There Is No Negative Trust on the Internet

On May 3rd, 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent the first spam email to 400 people. It was an invitation to a product demonstration for the DEC-20 computer, and the reaction was immediate and negative.

Nearly 50 years later, this same flaw in the internet’s design has given rise to more significant issues. Today, AI-driven bots not only overwhelm us with spam but also manipulate social and political discourse at scale.

Weekly Dev Meeting - Refactoring Connection Handler for Better Unit Testing

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week we’ve been focussed on a crucial refactoring task to improve how we manage network connections. The goal is to make it easier to isolate bugs by separating the connection handling logic from the transport layer so they can be tested independently.

What’s Changing:

Decoupling Connection Handling:

We’re separating the connection handling code from the transport layer. This change allows us to test connection states on their own, without involving the transport mechanisms.
With this separation, we can emulate connections and test different states more accurately, pinpointing problems faster.

Enhanced Testing and Debugging:

By isolating the connection handling, Nacho has created a series of unit tests to cover various connection scenarios, such as establishing, rejecting, and accepting connections.
This approach helps us identify areas needing improvement and ensures our changes lead to a more stable system.

Clearer Error Handling:

The refactor also simplifies error handling. By separating concerns, it’s easier to see if issues come from the connection handling or the transport layer, making debugging more straightforward.

Streamlined Codebase:

We’ve removed redundant and tangled code, simplifying the codebase and reducing potential failure points.

Next Steps:

Completing the Refactor:

Nacho is close to finishing this refactor. The plan is to replace all the old connection handling code with the new modular implementation.
This change will make the system easier to maintain and test, setting us up well for future enhancements.

Focusing on Transport Layer Issues:

Once the refactor is done, we’ll turn our attention to fixing any remaining transport layer issues. With the connection handling logic isolated, identifying and addressing these issues should be more manageable.
We’ll add more unit tests for the transport layer to cover all edge cases and ensure it works reliably.

Preparing for the Next Release:

If the transport layer is stable after the refactor, we’ll move forward with a release. This update will include the recent improvements and ensure our core network functionalities are solid.

Conclusion

This refactor should be the last step before launching the Freenet network. By modularizing the connection handling, we can test more thoroughly and fix issues more quickly, leading to a more stable platform.

How Freenet Works

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Clarke, the creator of Freenet, explains how we solve problems like efficiently finding data, adapt to changing network conditions, and managing a peer’s resource usage. Q&A includes how Freenet compares to other networks, the history of Freenet, and how Freenet adapts to geography.

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