Re: [Help-gnunet] New to gnunet

[Benjamin Kay]

On Sunday 11 April 2004 11:34 am, Steven wrote:
> I've been using freenet for a while now (mostly because I didn't know about
> freenet) and I'm pretty excited about trying out gnunet.

Welcome!

> There are some things about freenet that I find very interesting, and I'd
> like to know if they are, or will be implemented in gnunet:
>
> FEC encoding of splitfiles.  When you upload something to freenet, it
> creates extra blocks, that can be used to "heal" files on the network.

One of the big problems with freenet is lack of file permanence; literally 
everything on freenet is stored in the content migration database - nothing 
is permanent. As such, files have a tendency to drop off the network if they 
aren't requested often enough. Freenet uses FEC so that even if a few blocks 
of a file fall of the network, the file can be recontructed from the 
remaining blocks.

GNUnet allows for a certain degree of file permanence; files may be indexed by 
node operators making those files permanent on that node. This greatly 
reduces the need for something like FEC, since as long as a few people index 
a file is will never completely drop off of the network.