Good question, this has understandably been confusing.

They’re two distinct pieces of software created by the same project. The original Freenet dates back to the early 2000s and focused heavily on anonymity. In 2023 it was spun out into its own project and renamed Hyphanet. The two systems are very different and not compatible.

Work on a clean-slate successor started in 2019 under the internal name Locutus. That codebase rethinks the design from the ground up, based on lessons from running the original Freenet for many years and with different tradeoffs.

After the split in 2023, Locutus was renamed back to Freenet. What’s being shown here is that newer Freenet.

There’s a longer history and rationale in the FAQ if you want more detail: https://freenet.org/faq/#what-is-the-projects-history

This is mentioned in the FAQ; https://freenet.org/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-and-r...

So I guess this is still Locutus, which is the New FreeNet, related to Original FreeNet (by now rebranded to Hyphanet) in name only.

Freenet-core itself isn’t stable enough to rely on for something like family chat, and River is still missing some important operational pieces. In particular, there isn’t a smooth or robust way yet to handle things like updating the room contract, which is the decentralized part that defines membership and state. That makes recovery from mistakes or bugs harder than it should be.

That said, a lot of progress has been made recently. Stability has improved noticeably even over the past couple of weeks, and most of the remaining issues are about hardening and ergonomics rather than fundamental design problems.

I’m hesitant to give timelines, but my expectation is weeks rather than months before River is something I’d personally feel comfortable recommending for non-technical use. In the meantime, feedback from people trying it, especially around rough edges or failure cases, is very helpful.