Has anyone set up file-sharing, especially torrents or something similar, over freenet? It reminds me of reticulum in that it’s supposedly decentralized, but it looks more technically developed (i.e. not written in python).
My understanding of torrents is that they go to tracker locations, which I don’t really understand but seems like a centralized node of some sort. So, I assume torrents themselves can’t be ran through freenet, but is there something analogous we should be looking at?
I apologize if this is a dumb question I don’t have much knowledge in this area. I just want to make sure I’m staying on top of the relevant technologies.
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Public torrents don’t require trackers. Bittorrent can use DHT to operate completely decentralized.
Haven’t heard of torrent clients, or anything related to the bittorrent protocol, running on the Freenet network. They do have a list of their standard apps here https://freenet.org/apps/ , were you referring to some other app enabling bittorrent that isn’t listed there?
To be fair I’m way out of the loop, last time I tried Freenet must have been 20-something years ago. Apparently its been forked at some point and now Hyphanet exists as well (https://www.hyphanet.org/). EDIT: Not forked exactly, but there are two versions of Freenet now as explained in the FAQ https://freenet.org/about/faq/#what-is-the-projects-history
The only reason I noticed is that back when I tried Freenet there was 1 file sharing app that people sort of used called Frost (https://jtcfrost.sourceforge.net/) I just looked it up and it still exists but seems to work for the Hyphanet version of Freenet, maybe not the baseline Freenet itself. It’s not torrents but it exists if that’s something you’re interested in.
Also keep in mind unless things have drastically changed Freenet is SLOW, so file sharing is going to be SLOW. You’ve been warned :P
PS - Maybe check out I2P (https://i2p.net/), Torrents over I2P is a thing and more people should be using that IMO. You won’t need a VPN nor need to worry about port forwarding anymore. Downside is that it’s slower than regular torrents (but much, much faster than anything on Freenet). Another downside is that not enough people are using it so not a lot of seeds/peers.
I haven’t used the new Freenet, but have messed around with Hyphanet. You simply just upload files to the network, announce that they are uploaded (by making a Freesite, making a post on Sone, and/or making a post on their forum application (I forget what it’s called). Hyphanet is like a distributed file store that everyone can write to and read from. Kind of like an anonymized predecessor to IPFS. Large files will likely get evicted very fast, unless they are popular. And, it’s slow as hell.
