Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

The Year of the Linux Desktop was 1995, for me. I used to spend time advocating Linux. You can still find my old posts on comp.os.linux.advocacy and many mailing lists. But two things happened: I didn't have time for it due to family/career and Linux just got so easy to use it didn't really need my advocacy or help anymore. It has been on a very slow but as it took over pretty much every market *except* the desktop and nothing short of legal action against Microsoft or enforcement of open standards on the part of the government was going to change that.

Imagine getting millions of people to work for free over the course of 40 years implementing what the people in the product want instead of a corporate agenda and giving the result away for free and still only having single digit marketshare! That's a clear sign of a broken market.

You beat me by a matter of minutes, it would seem.

So then you support laws that empower unions to do more than just fund leadership's politics?

The manufacturers aren't the problem. They aren't the ones who make the rules about how their product is used on public thoroughfares.

The context of that phrase is almost always used for people who invite regulation with their own foolish/dangerous behavior.

At least this time you presented something more nuanced than "people can't afford housing because they spend too much on other things". You could have led with that.

Also, I live about as far from California as is geographically possible within the lower 48, so I'm not assuming any blame for what happens there.

What makes you think it's rich people who are doing the hiring?

Pretending that the cost of housing is a problem only for people who refuse to live within their means is certainly one way to show why resentment of the rich is near an all-time high.

Why would anyone want to work for a company that does stuff like this??

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.