Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and
publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on
forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less
vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to
their friends, is very difficult to detect.

Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes
to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information
and what its content is.

Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard
drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Files are automatically kept
or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being
discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files are encrypted, so
generally the user cannot easily discover what is in his datastore, and
hopefully can't be held accountable for it. Chat forums, websites, and search
functionality, are all built on top of this distributed data store.
