Freeing the Internet

Apps without platforms.

Ian Clarke

FUTO • July 17, 2026

a small-world network, no servers

The Hands-Off Era Is Over

UK 12,000 arrests in 2023 for “offensive” online posts

FR Charged Telegram’s founder for what its users posted

EU Fined X €120M over “disinformation”

US California wired age checks into the OS and app store

UK Reshaping what YouTube recommends, not just what it removes

This is not China or Iran. This is the West in 2026.

SAY (say the IMPLICATION, not the slide text):

Hands-off for decades. Now censorious, and fast.
UK: ~33 arrests a day for posts. The process is the punishment.
France: charge the founder personally, and every operator over-censors.
EU: €120M for "disinformation," so platforms scrub anything risky.
California: baked into the OS, below every app. Hardest to escape, even for us.
YouTube: re-rank, not remove. You can't protest what you never saw.
The West, not China or Iran. Borrowing the same toolkit.
Freenet: no operator to serve the order to.

BACKUP (Q&A / accuracy, not for live):

Arrests: 12,183 in 2023 (Times FOI), ~33/day, +58% since 2019. Say ARRESTS not convictions. Never "more than Russia" (fact-checked misleading).
Riots: Connolly 31mo, Kay 38mo (Public Order Act, separate bucket from the 12k, don't merge).
Durov: French authorities, Aug 2024, still unresolved.
X fine: EU DSA, Dec 2025, X challenging.
California AB 1043: passed 2025, effective 2027, OS + app store; critics/committee warn it sweeps in Linux package managers. Say "passed," not "enforcing."
YouTube: Ofcom Project Mercury (May 2026); YouTube/TikTok refused "safer feeds." Recommender-retune enforced for CHILDREN/"harmful"; downranking lawful "misinformation" for ADULTS is proposed and govt-rejected. Foil: committee called it "not censorship, just deprioritise."
Freedom House FOTN 2025: 15th year of decline; UK 76 vs China 9. Say "backsliding / borrowing the toolkit," not "as bad as China."

Services Without Servers

Every app runs on someone's servers.

your data • your messages • what you're allowed to see

Freenet has no server to own.

no client, no server • just peers

No one runs it.

no operator to compel • no takedown lever • no back door to mandate

Freenet vs the Traditional Web

A Growing Ecosystem

Contracts

Delegates

Ghost Keysreputation

Renegadeadaptive routing

Freenetnetwork

River

Delta

Atlas

freenet-git

Mail

Raven

Harvest

Foundation what it can do

search YouTube for “Freenet Lives”

Now what it does

Participation, Not Installation

Open freenet.org/try, and you're one click from a live room.

no install • no account • no download

Private, even hosted

encrypted at rest with a key only your browser holds

Yours to take

one click to move your data to your own peer

The try.freenet.org account panel: keep your access key, or move your data to your own peer

The real control, on try.freenet.org

SAY (cues):

Old barrier: install-first. Node, config, find an app, find people.
Now the first experience is participation, not installation.
Do it with me: pull out your phone, open freenet.org/try, hit "Join the Freenet chat room."
That's a real Freenet app loading on your phone. No install, no account, no download.
Hands up if it loaded. That's the demo, and it's in your pocket, not on my laptop.
Yes, hosted on our server for now. Encrypted at rest, key stays in your browser. But you're trusting the code we serve, which is exactly why the export-to-your-own-peer path matters.
Grab the key for your password manager if you want.
Own peer: export in about one click. Your data leaves with you.
Land: "The first experience can be participation, not installation."

BACKUP (Q&A / accuracy, not for live):

Served-code trust: the hosted /try runs JS we serve, so a compelled operator could ship key-stealing code. That's true of all in-browser crypto. The real answer is running your own peer, which is why export is one click.
If the room gets spammed live: that's the point, no one can delete it centrally. Moderation is room-level bans by the owner. Don't fight it on stage.

Rules in Code, Not a Company

Every app needs rules: who can post, what's valid, who owns what. On Freenet those rules live in code anyone can verify, not on a company's server.

contract = the rules, as WebAssembly code (its key is a hash of that code)

state = the app's data, and every change is signed

the contract decides → accept or reject each change, with no server in the loop

And your keys never leave your device: delegates hold them locally, so no one else can act as you.

The App Ships Over Freenet, Too

Freenet doesn't just host the data. It delivers the app itself to your browser, the way the web delivers Gmail.

Open a link, the app loads

no install, no app store

No company on either side

the UI comes from Freenet, the state lives in Freenet contracts

This is optional: riverctl is a command-line client. But shipping the app this way gives Freenet the web's reach, rich apps and all, without the web's platforms.

From the apps to the engine room

Engineered Like a CPU

next: routing that learns

Routing That Learns: Renegade

Renegade is an open-source predictive model: k-nearest neighbors with a learned metric, built for flexibility and good predictions from little data, no tuning.

Freenet asks it at every hop: which peer should I ask next? It learns from real behavior, peer, contract, distance, time, and predicts who will answer, and how fast.

Learning peer × contract together catches a peer that quietly drops requests for one specific contract.

Like a CPU's branch predictor: learn the likely path, don't stall.

Open source: github.com/sanity/renegade

Renegade learned models from live routing telemetry

Live models, learned from real routing telemetry

SAY (cues):

Renegade is a predictive model I wrote. Open source, general-purpose: k-nearest neighbors with a learned metric.
Designed for flexibility, good performance with no tuning, and good predictions from little data.
Freenet uses it at every hop: which peer should I ask next? Learns from real behavior, predicts who answers and how fast.
Analogy: branch prediction, but for the network. A CPU learns which way a branch goes so it never stalls; Renegade learns which peer answers so requests don't waste hops.
Peer × contract catches a peer quietly dropping one specific contract while it looks fine on everything else.
Graph: real live telemetry, the models fit to actual routing data. Not a mockup.

BACKUP (Q&A / accuracy, not for live):

Live in Freenet's routing since March 2026. Open source at github.com/sanity/renegade.
Blended conservatively with the existing router, not trusted blindly, so a bad prediction can't tank routing.
Privacy: each peer learns only from requests it already routes. No new data is collected, and nothing is shared between peers.

What's Running Today

App	What it is	Status
River	Group chat	Running, private rooms are new
Delta	Publishing	Running on Freenet
Atlas	Discovery / search	First version running
freenet-git	Developer tools	Working: clone, fetch, push

Four apps you can use today. More still coming.

River: Group Chat With No Backend

A live River room, running on Freenet today

A normal group chat. The difference is what's not behind it.

No River company server
No account or phone number
The room is a contract on Freenet
Popularity adds capacity, not a server bill

What's New: Private Rooms

Encrypted shared application state, hosted by a network that can't read it

Room secret

AES-256-GCM encrypts every message

Key distribution

ECIES (X25519) gives the secret to members only

Rotation

Weekly, and on every ban

Peers host and sync the room and enforce its rules, without ever reading what's inside.

What It Protects, and What It Doesn't

✓ It protects

Message content
Content from the peers that host the room
Content from removed members, after rotation

✗ It does not hide

That a room exists
Activity, timing, and message sizes
Membership and social-graph structure

And no Signal-style per-message ratcheting. This is shared room state with key rotation, a different design

SAY (cues):

Different question from Signal, not a better answer.
Be precise, cryptographers in the room. Protects content, not anonymity.
Not hidden: room exists, membership, timing, rough message sizes.
Not Signal's double-ratchet. Shared per-room key + rotation: a different trade-off, not a weaker Signal.
Double-ratchet, if useful (skip for experts): Signal re-keys every message, so a leaked key opens nothing before or after it. River: one room key that rotates, so not yet.
Strongest metadata + forward-secrecy for 1:1 today? Not this.
Signal folks here: strengths as fact. No gushing, no dig.
Still experimental. Proves private shared state can live on the network at all.

BACKUP (Q&A / accuracy, not for live):

Frame the key-rotation design as a deliberate trade-off, not a weaker version of Signal.
Don't claim anonymity or metadata-hiding.

Delta: Publishing Without a Hosting Provider

A real Delta site, published on Freenet today

Proof Freenet can host real publishing, not only chat.

Create & update
a site you edit like any other

Lives as state
the content is a Freenet contract

No provider
nothing to pay, nothing to take down

Running on Freenet today • github.com/freenet/delta

Atlas: Discovery Without a Gatekeeper

On the web, whoever runs discovery answers to advertisers, not you.

Atlas: an open, transparent index on the network.

You pick the index and the ranking. Good defaults, never locked in.

The live Atlas UI, running on Freenet today

SAY (cues):

Discovery = the quiet power center of the web.
Whoever runs search / the store / the feed decides what billions find. For advertisers and engagement, not you.
Atlas: discovery hosted across the network, no company owning that position. Transparent, not a black box.
The real point: you choose which index you trust and which algorithm ranks it. We ship good defaults, you're never locked in.
How it's built: a crawler indexes content, and a separate step writes neutral descriptions, today with an LLM. None of it is fixed, swap any part.
On the right: live Atlas UI on Freenet. Real and early.
No-gatekeeper is the goal. Today the default index and ranking are still run by us.

BACKUP (Q&A / accuracy, not for live):

Scale: don't say "anyone hosts the whole index", it won't stay small. It's hosted decentralized on the network; users pick which index(es) they trust.
No-gatekeeper is the GOAL, not today's reality. The default index and ranking are still run by us, with good defaults.

freenet-git: Git Without GitHub

Git remains Git. What changes is where the repository lives.

# the repo is a Freenet contract, not a server you log into
$ git clone freenet::96rknpy1GYhZ/freenet-stdlib
Cloning into 'freenet-stdlib'...
==> reading repo state from Freenet
    [legacy bundle 1/4] downloading pack (31.0 KiB)
    [bundle 6]  downloading pack (734.2 KiB)
    [bundle 15] downloading pack (743.3 KiB)
    ...
==> downloaded 18 bundle(s)
==> done

Same workflow developers already know
No account, no forge company, nothing to take the repo down
Working today: clone, fetch, push
A first building block for replacing GitHub: issues, reviews, CI can each be their own composable Freenet app

What's Next: Mail, Raven, Harvest

Mail

pre-alpha, deployed

Private asynchronous messaging. Post-quantum crypto. Extends Freenet from chat to email-shaped communication.

Raven

prototype

A social feed. Interesting because it stress-tests high-churn social state on Freenet.

Harvest

early design

A decentralized marketplace, like Etsy without the platform. Still design, not working software yet.

Not launch-ready. The point is that the same substrate is already taking on this many application shapes

Combine Them Like LEGO

Every app's state is an open contract on the same network. Any app can build on any other, no silos, no permission. Interoperability is the default.

freenet-git + River → Discuss code right where it lives

Delta + River → A published post with a real comment thread

Ghost Keys + Harvest → Reputation that's yours, across every app

Apps Without Platforms

River is group chat. Delta is publishing. Atlas is discovery. freenet-git is developer infrastructure. Mail, Raven, and Harvest are next.

The point isn't that Freenet has a chat app, or a publishing app, or a Git tool. It's that these are all the same pattern: applications whose backend is the network. Not a better platform. A way for applications to exist without platforms.

Try it now, no install

freenet.org/try

Run a real peer

freenet.org/quickstart

Questions?

Try it now, no install

freenet.org/try

Run a real peer

freenet.org/quickstart

freenet.org Matrix: #freenet:matrix.org @sanity on X