Not an expert but I have set up Freenet on my machine.
First SSH into your box (preferrably not as root) Then in your home directory "wget https://freenet.googlecode.com/files/new_installer_offline_1457.jar -O new_installer_offline.jar"
Then "java -jar new_installer_offline.jar"
Go into the subfolder that Freenet is in and "./run.sh"
Next, my personal method, download lynx via "sudo apt get install lynx" and run it with "lynx" (or choose a browser of choice) press g to go to a website.
Now go to 127.0.0.1:8888 for the wizard, it'll take you through the steps (choosing data store, upload and download bandwidth, etc.)
You can access the web interface later on and change whatever you like (via 127.0.0.1:8888)
More resources are here -> https://freenetproject.org/download.html
I'd say that the biggest problems that Freenet has is how heavy it is to run a server, especially when things like WoT and Sonne plugins are installed, and speed/reliability issues when pulling large files. Unfortunately I think I2P just makes those problems worse.
I love Freenet, but I feel like the best course of action now is to work on plausible deniability and anonymity features for IPFS. At it's core, IPFS is pretty much Freenet, but with opt in pinning rather than automatic, and a lot of the availability issues solved.
A really great example of this technology in action is https://d.tube, which just went live like a week ago. It's a YouTube clone where everything is served through IPFS. All the content is static, and ratings / incentives are all done via Steem, which is a decentralized, on-blockchain social network. I've been thinking through how it would work to have media files encrypted by default, and have the decryption keys passed around in the URLs, and then with some scripts to do auto-pinning, you could safely auto-pin encrypted content, and suddenly you're back to the security model of Freenet. That would be neat.
I'm guessing your proxies aren't being set right, you'll need to use something like FoxyProxy to route .i2p and Freenet requests appropriately.
What's happening is that your DNS requests for those domains are being sent to your normal DNS server (whatever you have that set as), you need to route your DNS requests to the i2p and Freenet services themselves as needed.
> You mean Tails in live mode
I wasn't aware it could be installed on a disk, but to be honest I don't know Tails that well.
> For Debian, I’d use this package[1] , right? It says that it’s in "early development stage" and that "the packages make no effort to preserve user data across different versions".
I installed Freenet by following these instructions (as explained here):
wget 'https://freenetproject.org/assets/jnlp/freenet_installer.jar' -O new_installer_offline.jar
java -jar new_installer_offline.jar
Correct, Tor does not support UDP.
However, you can use a VPN to patch Freenet's UDP traffic over Tor.
See the first graphic and section for "Using AirVPN with Tor:"
I've never done it, but I guarantee there will be a massive performance hit; both in bandwidth and latency. A VPN using TCP instead of UDP kills the bandwidth and routing over Tor will kill the latency.
I could be wrong on this point, but I think if any of the relays in your Tor circuit drop out, that the VPN connection will have to be reset. I imagine that would happen quite often and further degrade Freenet's performance.
Sidenote: I once was contacted by a lawyer and received some statistics of which the levine method claimed that they show a download. The numbers were even less (383 requests instead of 387) than what you would expect to see if someone was not the downloader. Documented here: https://freenetproject.org/statistical-results-without-false-positives-check-are-most-likely-wrong.html
Freenet is a pretty old p2p network that has a very unorthodox method to decentralize itself.
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Freenet not only encrypts data, doesn't require servers to host files and is very resilient, but also relies on the efficient structure of human social networks to operate. In secure mode, you need only connect to a few people you know using Freenet and as long as somebody in their network is connected to opennet you are connected to the whole thing.
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You can insert data, messages, whatever and go offline immediately after - it will still be available.
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Your second question about whether it's worth it is a bit trickier. I'd say as of now it is worth it if you like:
I've seen people sharing movies and other stuff on Freenet, but I'm sure you know how to get all of that stuff in other places as well.
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I hope I've helped you out a little. For a full explainer, go here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/documentation.html#understand
Yes it does.
From the project donations page: > All donations go to The Freenet Project Inc, a non-profit 501c3 corporation with the following mission statement:
On the scale of a few months I don't think that's enough to change it significantly. Was the drive external? If it was that could mean its throughput was not good.
Freenet certainly does not behave well in low-memory environments by default, and must be carefully tuned and operated to be viable there. One should configure memory limits such that running out of memory is avoided during normal operation. (There's an option on the "Core settings" page for it.)
In the future if you'd like help with stuff (and have time to wait around if no one's around) feel free to join the support chat.