Freenet was designed to enable anonymous, censorship-resistant information sharing. Content was distributed, encrypted, and stored across participant nodes, making it difficult to remove or trace. The system prioritized privacy and deniability over performance or usability.

Though challenging to use, Freenet explored the extreme end of decentralization under adversarial conditions. It highlighted the trade-offs between anonymity, resilience, and user experience, and influenced later systems concerned with censorship resistance and distributed storage.