freenet - uh, what the heck?

[alphabeater]

just downloaded freenet (direct download url) for that closer look i always promised myself i'd take, one day.

the program you get with it (fproxy) works using your browser, and can be opened by double-clicking the icon that freenet puts in your system tray when you run it. it makes freenet sites ('freesites', as they seem to be called) appear just like regular websites, albeit far more slowly. it reassures me, however, that

it can take up to a minute to request some information from Freenet. Your node will learn how to query the network more efficiently as you use it, and so you will notice that performance improves with time.

reassuring, if slightly annoying. from what i've tried so far, 'the freedom engine' (linked from the fproxy start page) is the freesite that appears most reliably, and there are quite a few links to try there. most of them, however, seem to end in dead-ends.

after this initial experience of freenet, i decided to try a p2p/messaging client that piggybacks on it - the best known (or only one?) seeming to be frost (direct download url). i'm left quite mystified by that whole experience - it seems unwilling to actually do anything, except give me a list of files (lots of ebooks and, as if fate was laughing at me in some way, three christmas tunes labelled as being by andy williams) that i somehow managed to obtain but then failed miserably to download any of, and lots of seemingly encrypted messages.

frost seems to have all the bits in place to download files, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out how to share any with the thing.

my head hurts now.. to sum up the experience, i'm frustrated with the low speed and unavailability of freesites in freenet, and downright baffled by the filesharing. i'd be interested to hear anyone else's experiences..