An 8-week measurement in June–August 2012 discovered 58,571 unique Freenet installations across 102,376 distinct IP addresses; approximately 25% were in the US and 12.5% in Germany, with Europe and North America collectively representing the vast majority — users from countries typically associated with Internet censorship were a small minority.
From 2014-roos-measuring — Measuring Freenet in the Wild: Censorship-resilience under Observation
· §5.1
· 2014
· Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
Implications
Censorship-resistance tools that rely on decentralized P2P overlays may fail to attract at-risk users in censored regions despite correct protocol design — discoverability, usability, and bootstrap-node accessibility in target geographies require dedicated investment.
Measure the actual deployment geography before designing routing optimizations; Freenet's 2012 deployment did not match the expected high-censorship-country distribution, which affects threat-model assumptions about adversarial node presence.