A new direction?

Phex is great, but unfortunatly under-apreciated by some . Just a suggestion, but FreeNet is also a Java based program. I think that a hybrid, Gnutella/FreeNet client (creating a new network, with the benefits of both) would be amazing.

Interesting idea, but WHY?

You wan't to drop back five and punt?

1. Gnutella is an established protocol.
2. Look at the progress that has already been made in the development of the protocol and clients like Phex.
3. Gnutella has an installed userbase.

You might as well suggest that Microsoft and Apple both abandon their OSes and create a new one together that is incompatible with what everyone else is using. Would you buy it?

a network with privacy in mind is certainly the way of the future. Individual gnutella users have already been targeted. Currently freenet is to difficult for the masses, unsearchable, and only shares files published to the limited space available on freenet.

It might be best to make a client that can search both the gnutella network and a new gnutella/freenet network. It would also be nice to add some sort of filefreedom (only anonymous).

[caused]

a network with privacy in mind is certainly the way of the future.

I hope not. I mean I understand that privacy is important, but I would hope that the future of the world will respect freedom of speech more then they do today. I would hate it if the only way we can do this is by hiding and obscuring things, plus anonymity is pointless to an author trying to get attention and gain a reputation, and use that reputation to make money through this network.

I understand though that if the world gets worse about the control of information (draconian style), then excessive and ineffecient obscurity of data would be very important.

There are other issues surrounding their techniques besides searching. In some ways Mojonation (mojonation.net) is like Freenet but with search ability, but one of the big problems they suffer is that publishing files is dependant the block servers stay up and stay online, if someone comes into the network for the first time and tries to start a block server, stores some blocks and then finds they cant get the files they want, leave the network never to return, the pieces they stored get lost and files are broken and incomplete if enough people do it. A common occurance with certain sized files, is that the file is always incomplete missing blocks.

[konrad_h]

I have been following the development of Freenet very closely as I consider it to be one of the most interesting p2p-systems for the future. Privacy and anonymity are not the only issues directly addressed by freenet, but scaling and performance are also expected to be quite high once freenet has a substantial user base.

I am really thinking of ways to integrate Freenet into Phex, but as so many other fascinating ideas it isn´t that important at the moment as there are so many other pressing issues we have to get done first.

However, once I see a way the users could really profit from it I will try to get it implemented right away.