Welcome to FreeWeb - your Freenet Gateway

Request Data

Key:

Help

Introduction

This is FreeWeb, it is a part of Freenet which allows you to access Freenet through your web browser. Essentially, it simulates a new Internet domain called '.free', so you can surf sites on .free in the same way as you surf the mainstream Web.

FreeWeb works much like the old FProxy, except that it:

  • Is faster and more reliable than FProxy
  • You can use it full-time as a regular http proxy server
  • It has a switchable anonymity filter that's more accurate than FProxy
  • Any requests to FreeWeb sites, (eg 'www.somesite.free'), get converted into regular Freenet URIs (eg 'freenet:MSK@KSK@freeweb/somesite//'

You can return to this page at any time by pointing your browser to http://free, or http://127.0.0.1:portnum, where 'portnum' is the port number (usually 8888) you've got FreeWeb set to

 

Requesting keys from Freenet

To request a file you must know the "key". To find some stuff that others have inserted you can try one of these "freesites":

Be aware that it can take up to a minute or more for anything you click on to come through from Freenet. Your node will learn how to query the network more efficiently as you use it, and so you will notice that performance improves with time. Additionally, the more popular the key you are requesting the less time it will take. The reason for the delay is that Freenet must search for information in a manner that protects your anonymity.

FreeWeb has been designed like the old FProxy, so that if you download a web-page from Freenet, the page can have hyperlinks to other documents within Freenet which FProxy will download as if you had just clicked on a hyperlink on the WWW.

Inserting files into Freenet

FreeWeb makes this process very easy.
If you're running on Windows, all you need to do is right-click on the 'butterfly' icon in your task tray (usually on the bottom right of the screen), and click on the 'Show FreeWeb Window' option. To publish files into Freenet, you only need to drag a folder from Explorer onto the FreeWeb window, choose a name for your site, then click on 'Refresh Sites' to insert the files. It's that easy :)

If you're running on Linux, then you'll most likely be more technically familiar with Freenet. In this case, you only need create a Freesite with a tool such as freenetmirror or PutFiles, then create a key called 'KSK@freeweb/sitename' with a redirect to your site's daily mapfile.

Be aware that it may take several minutes or more to insert some information. To see some examples of keys take a look here. If you would like others to know about what you have inserted you can submit it to a keyindex, such as this one. For a much more detailed explanation of how you can create entire websites that can be updated regularly within Freenet, please look at Creating Websites in Freenet on the Freenet homepage.


Gateway edited by David McNab
from the original FProxy version by Theodore Hong and Brandon Wiley
The Freenet Project