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

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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/

HN · launched Jan 8, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 75%) · 0 views

Niche: peer-to-peer marketplaces and decentralized networking · 42 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Data infrastructure
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Source listing ↗

More like this: all 42 launches in peer-to-peer marketplaces and decentralized networking →

Could you build this?

No Building a decentralized peer-to-peer web replacement from scratch requires advanced distributed systems, cryptography, P2P network topology, and deep Rust systems programming.

What it would actually take: The stack involves low-level systems programming in Rust, WebAssembly sandboxing for smart contracts/apps, custom cryptographic protocols, and distributed hash tables (DHT) optimized for high churn and anonymity. The difficult parts include secure peer discovery, censorship resistance, sybil attack prevention, and state synchronization across an untrusted network, demanding world-class peer-to-peer and cryptographic protocol researchers.

Discussion

7 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Hyphanet (original Freenet, for anonymity-focused use)

Concerns raised: Freenet-core not stable enough for production use like family chat, Missing robust way to handle room contract updates and decentralized membership changes, Recovery from mistakes or bugs is harder than it should be, Naming confusion between Freenet, Hyphanet, and Locutus projects

Feature requests: Smooth and robust room contract update mechanism, Better ergonomics and operational hardening for production readiness

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 152 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #127 of 153 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 60 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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