Show HN: Freenet alpha, a drop-in decentralized replacement for the web

We’ve been working on a new version of Freenet for the last couple of years. The original Freenet dates back to the early 2000s; this is a ground-up rewrite in Rust and is intended as a general-purpose platform for building decentralized systems.

The alpha has been running since shortly before Christmas and has been gradually stabilized over the last few weeks, though it is still definitely alpha quality.

Freenet is a decentralized key-value store where keys are WebAssembly contracts. These contracts define what values can be associated with a key and how those values are updated. Web applications can be distributed over Freenet and use it as a decentralized back end.

The main application at the moment is a decentralized group chat app called River, which serves as a concrete example of this model. It runs fully peer-to-peer, with no servers or federation, and is usable for real conversations between multiple peers.

The alpha also reports live network telemetry, which is exposed via a public dashboard. It shows peers joining, message traffic, and other network activity in real time.

Getting started should be fairly quick. There’s a one-page quickstart that installs a local peer as a service on Mac or Linux and lets you join the network in a few minutes.

Links: Quickstart: https://freenet.org/quickstart/

Live telemetry dashboard: http://nova.locut.us:3133/

General info: https://freenet.org/

FAQ: https://freenet.org/faq/