Freenet 0.7.5 build 1493 is now available.
Download Freenet for Desktop (Windows, MacOSX, GNU Linux, nix) or for Android*
This build provides four core improvements:
- Curated default bookmarks, including an actively maintained index and Shoeshop for sneakernet
- Better peer scaling for very fast nodes
- Updated defaults to adapt to the higher capacities of modern systems
- Compatibility with Java 17, first in the installers, with the following update for all nodes
Together these changes should improve the user experience for new people, give sneakernet the visibility it deserves, and increase the performance of the network as a whole.
Default Bookmarks
The curated default bookmarks provide a much better first-start experience. Previously new users saw mostly outdated sites in inactive indexes.
By adding Shoeshop to enable sneakernet which can connect separate Freenet networks even if no internet connection can be established (by transferring data via SD card without being able to corrupt what others write) Freenet now provides easy access to all the tools for self-publishing, not only in the style of publishing an online blog (which is already easy with Sharesite) or sending a file to an independent printer, but in the much more self-reliant style, resourcefulness and rebellious spiritWP of classical samizdat.
Peer-Scaling
Adjusted peer-scaling fixes a conceptual problem: Fast nodes could not utilize their bandwidth well enough, because the previous peer-scaling did not take the aggregated bandwidth limit of the peers into account. Now very fast nodes have linearly scaling peer-counts to make it more likely that the capacity of their peers added together matches the capacity of the fast node. The absolute upper limits stay in place, because they are needed to preserve privacy. There are also no changes to the peer-scaling of slower nodes.
The fixed scaling should improve the performance of the whole network because it avoids creating artificial bottlenecks.
Default Settings
Changes to the defaults are a doubled thread limit of newly installed nodes (increased from 500 to 1000), with the stack size per thread reduced by half to avoid higher memory consumption, the datastore size is increased from 20GiB to 100GiB, because SSDs are much faster and more resilient than before, and the default bandwidth to offer if the actual speed cannot be found is doubled to 32KiB/s.
These newer defaults should also improve the first-time user experience.
Java 17
Compatibility with Java 17 took longer than we hoped, because it required deploying a newer wrapper and changes to the classpath. This makes it easier to support packages for modern Linux, and it should avoid losing nodes when Java updates itself (starting from the next update this also applies to existing nodes; we have to deploy the update code in 1493 so it can run during the update to 1494).
Translations
And last, but definitely not least, our translation team updated enough of the German, Persian, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish texts in Freenet that we can ship the new versions. Thank you very much!
Contribute
If you want to help us get better, please chat with us in #freenet @ irc.libera.chat. And give us time to answer, we’re all volunteers and might not be in your timezone.
To get into development right-away, have a look at one of the Freenet-Projects or just get fred and fix something that annoys you.
And to take on something that makes a big difference, have a look at the high-impact tasks.
What is Freenet?
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for
censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting
publishing and communication.
That Freenet can keep moving forward and help people worldwide to exercise their basic rights and freedoms is the work of amazing volunteers, both contributors and people running Freenet nodes.
Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for using Freenet!
-- AB
Download Freenet for Desktop (Windows, MacOSX, GNU Linux, nix) or for Android*