On 9 Jul 2006, at 11:12, Colin Davis wrote: > That said, I do agree with toad, that there should be a reason for > people to still use the darknet, to help ensure that a number of > people still DO use the Darknet. I proposed one way to help ensure > this- Expose the work freenet is doing to get through NAT, track > IP, etc, to other programs, by forwarding packets from other > programs, acting as a Hamachi-style server. This helps to ensure > people actually connect via the darknet, and actually connect // > With their friends//.
I don't see why it is necessary to provide artificial incentives for people to run a darknet node, other than the real incentive of making it much harder for people to know that you are running a Freenet node. I'm also a bit concerned that turning Freenet into some kind of generic JXTA-like platform for packet-forwarding is a potentially distracting form of mission-creep. Our key barriers to adoption right now are usability ones, and the simple reality is that the lack of an opennet solution is excluding by-far the most popular use-case for Freenet, which are people that just want to get connected conveniently and who don't really care all that much about who knows whether they are running Freenet. Providing support for the opennet use-case is not to the exclusion of the darknet use-case, indeed given that it will bring more users, more developer interest, and more donations, it will provide us with more resources for working on both the darknet and the opennet. Ian.
