You didn't say "IPFS", which made me realize that your post is largely repeating the same points in favor of censorship on Usenet.
This is only increasing my confidence that networks which are aware of their underlying contents are inherently unable to effectively counter censorship, because individual nodes can always be pressured to drop content, and the Pareto principle guarantees that this censorship will be effective as long as the pressure is put on the most popular nodes.
I hear and am sympathetic to your point of view. Google takes a similar stance with email, Gmail, and spammers; consider, "Yes, Google censors when we don't relay someone's spam and serve it off our servers. At the same time, we're not preventing any other mail relays from forwarding that mail." (I'm not speaking for Google, merely making a rhetorical argument.) This is widely considered a good thing.
I am merely disappointed that IPFS, which has a lot of backing and is growing in popularity, may become both the dominant content-addressable distributed object system, and also remain lacking in terms of anonymity and availability.
(Also, while I am no fan of Freenet, you are equivocating censorship with cache expiration. One is done by people and one is done by an content-oblivious algorithm. Tahoe-LAFS's garbage collection works in the same way and is also not censorship.)
In IPFS the user's computer connects to whatever node has the content, popular or not. This means that even if the the 100 most popular nodes in the world have enough pressure put on them that they refuse to host a file, I can still host the file on my laptop and everyone with an internet connection will be able to access it.
This is only increasing my confidence that networks which are aware of their underlying contents are inherently unable to effectively counter censorship, because individual nodes can always be pressured to drop content, and the Pareto principle guarantees that this censorship will be effective as long as the pressure is put on the most popular nodes.
I hear and am sympathetic to your point of view. Google takes a similar stance with email, Gmail, and spammers; consider, "Yes, Google censors when we don't relay someone's spam and serve it off our servers. At the same time, we're not preventing any other mail relays from forwarding that mail." (I'm not speaking for Google, merely making a rhetorical argument.) This is widely considered a good thing.
I am merely disappointed that IPFS, which has a lot of backing and is growing in popularity, may become both the dominant content-addressable distributed object system, and also remain lacking in terms of anonymity and availability.
(Also, while I am no fan of Freenet, you are equivocating censorship with cache expiration. One is done by people and one is done by an content-oblivious algorithm. Tahoe-LAFS's garbage collection works in the same way and is also not censorship.)