Editing Freenet Manifesto (section)

== Stage 2: The Digital Village ==

The unseen benefit of the aforementioned co-ops is that they wrest
the terminal nodes of the network away from the control of the
telco/ISP hegemony. This provides for the opportunity of network
applications that are truly peer-to-peer. At first, this will only be
able to happen within each isolated cooperative community. Imagine
that Grinnell (or some other town) makes shared use of a few pipes,
whose flow of information is distributed accross the last mile via
mesh. Now imagine that each node of that mesh network is a Diaspora
pod running a codebase that is specifically designed for use in mesh
networks (this is in development, but a ways off). People will still
have to rely on the big pipes for access to the wider internet, but to
pass each other messages and participate in social networking, at
least within the town of Grinnell, we will have achieved a truly
peer-to-peer architecture. Thus arises the digital village. What used
to be just a co-op for purchasing access has suddenly become a
community that is able to share information directly with one another.
It takes only a little more imagination to see that Diaspora is one of
many applications that could run on this architecture. I happen to
believe that the social network is the network's 'killer-app,' and so
I have chosen to use Diaspora as an example.