Freenet has a different concept than MaidSAFE: While MaidSAFE (as it was when I last looked into it — a few years ago) is a hosting and application platform, the focus of Freenet is to be the technical component for censorship resistance. Everything it provides comes from this — even the recently added video and Android support (because Black Lives Matter showed clearly that the information that people need to share the most is video content nowadays).

Therefore the overarching design goal of freenet is to make censorship as hard as technically possible. That’s the reason for - providing anonymity (else you could be threatened with repercussions - as seen in the case of the wikileaks informer from the army in the USA), - building it as free software network (else you could just shut down the central website, as people tried with wikileaks), - providing safe pseudonyms and caching of the content on all participating nodes (else people could censor by spamming or overloading nodes), - including good moderation tools (otherwise people could censor by just "flooding the zone with shit"), and even - the darknet mode and enhancements in usability (else freenet could be stopped by just prosecuting everyone who uses it, or it would reach too few people to be able to counter censorship in the clearnet).

One core difference between MaidSAFE is that Freenet provides communication. Content in Freenet stays accessible while people access it, without tracking accesses: When you upload something, you can imagine that a clock starts ticking. After a while (depending on file size) the content is no longer accessible. But if someone accesses it, their node "heals" that content, which resets that clock.

Also Freenet enables people to connect purely to their friends, so there’s no central point of failure or detection.

I once did a comparison to other projects for a funding proposal (that did not succeed, though) which should still give you an idea about the difference between Freenet and other systems: http://www.draketo.de/proj/freenet-funding/#sec-9

Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed filesystem, during which time others had existed in the wild for some time.) The "arguable" part is whether you could include eDonkey, GNUnet, and others in that list. What is true AFAIK is that Freenet was the first such system with things like censorship resistance as a primary design goal (though the MojoNation folks might even disagree with that) and a non-trivial user base.

In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/615/freenet.pdf

Really cool stuff, thank you for this!

Great content, by the way.