How do you know what was uploaded, let alone that those were the only things uploaded? If I remember Freenet’s model correctly, files were distributed across the network as encrypted fragments and no one knew what exactly was being shared on his own node.

(I was a curious teenager and followed links I shouldn't have.) It had a ~1998 web feel. So you would mostly discover things by surfing around. Normal content would take ages to load or didn't load at all. (Bad distribution, because no-one had interest in it.) While the other stuff would load faster than AmpLand. (Very good distribution, because lots of demand.)

Plus: There was a eDonkey like file sharing program that worked on top of freenet. (As well as a Usenet clone and a "Instant" Messenger.) You could share files without uploading them first. Like Gnutella it had passive search. (It shows you the files and search terms of other users going through your system.) So you could see what the demand was for. Edit: The demand was not for Hollywod movies.

There is no such thing as running a relay in freenet. Every user is the same as every other. The size and traffic of your node is literally a setting on the gui. All traffic and data are encrypted so you have no idea what's living on your node and what's coming in and out. That's the whole point of freenet.

I don’t think he is claiming he ran a relay and could see the traffic passing through it. Just that he had a good idea what moved about on the network from following random links as he explored it - popular stuff would load fast, non-popular would be slow. He found out what was popular.

Run a DC++ client connected to some major hubs and snoop on the queries that people search for and you will lose all hope for humanity.

People definitely search for awful stuff, but that doesn’t mean that such stuff is the only thing shared on DC++. It is films and music that draws so many people to DC++.

20 years ago, DC++ was the best place to get full anime seasons with fan subs. Nowadays, nearly everything is on Hulu, or crunchyroll, or illegitimate streaming sites.

DC++ is still useful if you want full Blu-ray images of films. Most other public pirate channels are sharing only downsampled or remuxed films.

I'm just wondering if some of this could be automated scans (possibly by law enforcement?)

Even without the CP. Three decades ago, on the campus network when I was studying for my undergraduate degree, I fired up etherman (or something like it, it's been a loooong time). It helpfully parsed out the HTTP URLs for me, and I clicked on a few out of curiousity.

I turned that sniffer off soon after, and never ever looked again. Even the (likely) legal things people were looking for were hard to unsee.

Humanity is mostly good, it just isn't universally good. Providing services that rely on "universally good" to avoid being dominated by the tiny but horrible minority is always a disaster.

> Humanity is mostly good

I don't believe there is any evidence to back this up whatsoever. People are compelled to be "good" by society and laws, nothing more. Humanity is fundamentally bad, but reined in by a handful of powerful people and organizations.

Society is an important part of humanity. And if humans were "fundamentally bad", it would be unlikely, statistically, for there to be a handful of powerful people compelled to rein in those bad impulses, rather than amplify them.

It's the same thing with the old reddit alternatives. Very few people are actually going to bother purely for the sake of principles, so the alternatives end up flooded with the ones that are forced to alternatives for good reasons.

If the mainstream Internet banned "dissidents" I believe such things would have more uptake by other types of users.

The threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin), which recently became popular due to the Reddit API protests, is pretty healthy.

Of course, there are some servers catering to 'dissidents' (e.g. Lemmygrad, Exploding Heads), but it's easy enough to avoid those communities.