Relationship to Fred

"Fred" is the software commonly known as Freenet, which Ian Clarke and other volunteers created in 2000 and have continually maintained since then.

Locutus will be a general-purpose, cryptographically secure, decentralized, distributed computation and communication platform.

Locutus won't replace Fred; they're trying to solve different (but related) problems. Key differences between Locutus and Fred:

• Locutus is designed to support real-time communication, fast enough for IM - less than 1 second, compared to 1 minute for Fred.

• Fred is primarily a research platform, and this has limited its adoption. While it continues to improve, ease of use has always been an issue for Fred. Locutus is being designed from the ground up to be no more difficult to use than a web browser.

• Fred has signed subspace keys, Locutus' contracts are a greatly generalized version of this concept that form the building blocks of a flexible distributed computation platform.

• Fred has a strong focus on anonymity. Anonymity is not a core design goal for Locutus itself, but systems that provide greater privacy can be built on top of it.

• Fred is implemented in Java, Locutus is implemented in Rust. Rust apps can be far more lightweight than their Java equivalents because they don't need the JVM.