I'd say no because freenet storage depends on popularity of the files.

If nobody is interested to download your files, which they wouldn't be because they are undecryptable blobs, then very soon you will be the only one storing those files, and you have gained nothing from making them available on freenet, but you have wasted your own bandwidth by uploading them.

Also it would be horribly slow as far as storage goes compared to a hard drive.

I’ve never heard about disk space as a relevant constraint on crypto mining. Do you mind elaborating or sharing a link or term I can search?

Probably https://www.chia.net/ , a crypocurrency that uses "Proof of Space and Time" (prove you've stored stuff on disk) rather than proof of work.

Chia Coin miners use hard drive space as proof of work.

No. The data being stored as proof of work cannot be useful, otherwise it's not "work".

Hm... This is of course "arguing semantics", which some people for some reason seem to think is a trump[§] card to declare a counter-argument irrelevant, but still: Another way to look at that leads to the direct opposite: If it doesn't yield a useful result, it's not "work" but frivolous waste.

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[§]: Eurgh.

I wouldn't say it's a semantic argument, it's just that the semantics are a bit overloaded. The stored data is useful as a "proof of work" in the cryptocurrency sense, but it's not useful in every other sense of the word, i.e. it's not used to represent meaningful information like like text, application binaries, images, audio etc.

Yeah, back when I was a kid I couldn't come beaming to my dad and expect praise for "Dad! Dad! I dug four holes today and then filled them up again, haven't I done good work?!" I'd have got not only a "That's not 'work', you idiot! Work is useful -- that was wasted effort!", but most probably a clip around the ear, too. And those are the norms I've internalised, so that's how my semantics swing: This whole crypto shit is inherently morally repugnant to me, because it's based on proof of waste.