I'm nobody, and nobody should listen to me, but here's my 2 cents anyways. I expressed something like this on IRC a few days ago. I'm also new so I may be missing relevant project history.
I don't believe Freenet has realized much of its potential utility at present. Therefore, I believe the way for Freenet to bring the most utility to the most people, given the available development capacity, is to mature the existing plugin ecosystem around existing Freenet, and expand the feature set provided. (When I say "integrate into fred" I mean via plugins) Specifically, in roughly this order: 1. Integrate something like FMS into fred, possibly by fixing freetalk. In my opinion a threaded discussion system is a more effective and flexible mode of communication than microblogging. Really you can microblog in a threaded discussion system as well. 2. Integrate something like OpenBazaar into fred. I imagine this could be something of a "killer app" for Freenet as it exists today. The world seems to be hungry for a decentralized marketplace, and Freenet can deliver on that with fairly minimal effort in my opinion. 3. Integrate something like infocalypse into fred, with a github-like UI for managing projects, tracking bugs, and collaborating. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub as my justification for that need (there's also censorship BY github). It's also possible that #2 can/should depend on this. This would be a huge undertaking, so perhaps some sort of minimum useful subset of this would be good instead. In my opinion as an interested outsider/someone trying to involve himself in the project, I'm not in favor of "Freenet 2" at this point. I believe development efforts are better applied against making Freenet more useful to more people. Strategically, I believe #2 in particular has the potential to attract a lot more developer attention which could in turn facilitate a "Freenet 2" effort in the future (or a code cleanup). I further believe that #2 could potentially attract funding to the project. OpenBazaar has a fair amount of funding, indicating interest and available money. I wouldn't presume to tell anyone where they should expend their development effort, but this is just my two cents, do with it as you will. Cheers, Dan On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Michael Grube <michael.gr...@gmail.com> wrote: > Bold indeed. > > Necessary, in my opinion. The complexity that the project will ultimately > face due to disparate and poorly documented code will eventually outweigh > the benefits even of holding on to current users. > > The currently complex code also means that Freenet may become a security > joke, which is not acceptable. > > My contributions have been limited but I believe this would be a step in > the right direction. > > Thanks, > Mike > > On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Ian <i...@locut.us> wrote: > >> For those that appear to be craving a "bold new strategy", one thing I've >> proposed in the past would be to put the main Freenet codebase in >> "maintenance mode", and throw our resources behind >> http://tahrirproject.org/ >> (possibly renaming it "Freenet 2" since Tahrir is a terrible name). >> >> Tahrir addresses several key concerns: >> >> - The people we actually want to help, those in China, Iran, etc, often >> have very constrained bandwidth. Tahrir is designed for this, Freenet >> is a >> bandwidth hog >> - Tahrir is designed for a Twitter/Facebook type use-case >> ("microblogging"), which has proven very powerful in terms of promoting >> political change >> - It's a fresh-ish codebase, much smaller, although needs some cobwebs >> blown off >> - Can incorporate a mixnet, but actually better suited to a mixnet than >> Tor because latency is less of an issue >> >> Clearly, this would not be a direct successor to Freenet, it would not be >> backwards compatible, and would be designed for a different (but perhaps >> more current) use-case. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> Ian. >> _______________________________________________ >> Devl mailing list >> Devl@freenetproject.org >> https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl > _______________________________________________ > Devl mailing list > Devl@freenetproject.org > https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
