Every few years I’m setting up #GNUnet to see how it’s evolving, but this iteration of the exercise with 0.25.2 makes me think it’s actually devolving 🤔

The documentation has gone completely out of sync with the tools, many core services had been rewritten from scratch and barely anything works anymore, There seem to be no public nodes on the Internet, last nodes bootstrap was published for 0.22. There seems to be no online community, IRC or Matrix channels etc. Even a 100% private network composed of two isolated nodes only works in basic functionality (gnunet-publish and that would be it).

I would very much someone to come and tell me “no no, it’s actually alive!” but it doesn’t look like that at all, especially when I have comparison against its state a few years.

Lots of brilliant ideas and features are buried in this project, but to be honest it seems like it became an entirely self-focused academic playground suffering from endless feature creep, always unfinished, with no working deliverables.