Ian, for over 10 years, I have been a member of the Freenet community, too.
You have some grave misunderstandings which I would like to clear up. They concern: - what you think you're entitled to do vs. what you actually are. - what you think your personal qualities are vs. the actual ones. - *especially* what you think the consequences of forcing this through will be vs. what they actually will be. - what Freenet needs. You seem to believe that by inventing Freenet, you own it and can do whatever you want with it forever. You discovered its math, which is great, but that does not make you the owner of the math, math has no owner. Instead, Freenet, like any other open source software, is a meritocracy. You have not contributed **any** useful merit for well over 10 years. You do not write code. You do not regularly communicate with the team. You do not even talk to the users on Freenet itself. And I am fairly confident you haven't even used Freenet in ages. Typically, you are only one thing: absent for years. Then all you do is burst into the "room" every once in a while, tell everyone that what they're doing is garbage, and boss them around. Hence you're **not** entitled to use the name Freenet like you want to. The people who have been writing the code for the past decades are. Which brings us to your qualities: Yes, by having a dominant, pushy character, you are good at acquiring funding. But unfortunately, this is also what is called narcissism. You are the absolutely stereotypical manager which annoys everyone who does the **actual** work. You are not just bad at helping a team of developers, but you're actually **so bad** that the only thing you do is interrupt them. Let's talk about the elephant in the room: Nobody on the core team likes you. None. They only don't say this because they're afraid of your outbursts. You're an obstacle to them, and have been for a long time. The only reason you haven't been banned yet is that migrating the infrastructure would have been detrimental to Freenet's users and a waste of time. But this only applies up to a certain level of misbehavior. So while you think you can just force the developers to do what you want, what will actually happen is this: They'll treat you as a malicious actor, an attacker, like any other open source project would do, and fork the project - under the **original** name. Because Freenet aims to prevent censorship. That includes censorship of Freenet itself. They will publicly discredit you, and you'll be known **not** as the great leader you think you are, but just another person who turned evil. Look at how everyone hates Elon Musk, that's you, just with less money. Finally, let's talk about what Freenet needs: Freenet needs not your vision, but to be left alone by you. While you have been rambling here, Arne has merged dozens and dozens of pull requests, some of which are the 70th (!) part of continous work. Yes, it is a 20 years old codebase. But it has people who understand it, and who work to resolve its issues. People who have been working on it for **decades**. You sully their great efforts with your belief that you'd somehow still "own" Freenet. The patience to merge the 70th part of a branch, **as a volunteer** is ridiculously valuable and **not** something you can provide. **Especially** not something you should tamper with and mess up. Once your fancy new project is at the point where Freenet is now, it will be in the same situation: Rust won't be the cool toy of the day anymore, and someone will urge to rewrite it. Yet another 20 years wasted. The rewrite-treadmill is futile and must be avoided. Please do everyone a favor and step down as leader and transfer leadership to Arne who does the actual work. Stick to acquiring money for Locutus. Have fun with Locutus, nobody asks you to stop. But do **NOT** abuse the merit and name of the Freenet community to advertise Locutus. You did not add to Freenet's merit in a long time, so it is not your property. Locutus must have its own name and its own infrastructure. Move it to its own domain and GitHub with a different name than "Freenet". You do not deserve to use the name Freenet. Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
