Comment by nextgens
1 day ago
The original freenet design was replicating content as it was requested. You had no way of locating "all" the copies as they would get cached "along the way" elsewhere on the keyspace when you request them.
That property was useful both for improving availability AND censorship resistance: you could not attempt to "locate" where the blocks are without spreading them.
My naive understanding of the new design is that you can have contracts that are replicated... but they still cluster around the same place in the keyspace so any capable active adversary can actively deny access to content trivially. Did I misunderstand something here?
The two systems aren't that different in this regard, both replicate data along request paths.
In both systems data will tend to cluster on peers close to the data's location because otherwise requests couldn't find it.
The main difference is that in the new Freenet the content can be updated, with updates propagating through peers hosting the content.