Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet). The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine. Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly…
Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps launched on May 21, 2026 with 390 votes, #41 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for building decentralized applications using a global key-value store powered by WebAssembly contracts. It enables developers to create distributed apps without central servers, with early examples including River for group chat, Delta for content management, and Atlas for search. Users can build their own applications on the network, which has been operational since December.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Imagine if the internet wasn't controlled by a handful of giant corporations. Freenet is a platform for building applications that run on a peer-to-peer network instead of centralized servers. That means no cloud provider, app store, or platform owner gets to decide whether your application continues to exist. Build social networks, marketplaces, collaborative tools, AI systems, and other applications on infrastructure owned by its users.
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for apps that no company controls. Your computer becomes part of a global network, and the apps running on it can’t be taken down, don’t track you, and need no servers behind them. The one to try first is River , group chat that feels like Signal or WhatsApp with nobody in the middle. The browser version is the real River on the real Freenet network. You're just borrowing a peer we run instead of one on your own machine, so your keys live with us. Installing your own peer takes a couple of minutes on Windows, macOS or Linux, and keeps everything on your side. For Users Freenet apps run in your browser and look like normal websites, but they…from freenet.org
In the maker’s words, at launch
For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet). The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS.…
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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…
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