The Bleak State of ZeroNet and the Uncertain Future of Decentralized Networks in General

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I decided to write a short article on a topic that has been depressing me for quite a while. My favorite decentralized network, ZeroNet, is sliding slowly into a shallow grave. I have been an active user since the Spring of 2018, and I have never seen it in this bad a shape. Back in 2018, I was amazed by ZeroNet and highly enthusiastic about its prospects. Although it only had a few dozen active users, they all seemed smart and interesting. My feeling was that ZeroNet's only problem was that not enough people were using it. As time went by, however, we all began to understand ZeroNet better, and the blemishes began to be revealed. Somewhere between two and three years ago, ZeroNet stopped growing and began to shrink. Today, while it is still technically alive--it still works as well as it always has--almost no one is using it. I am now down to visiting only once or twice a month. As I write this, ZeroNet is a zombie network with only between one and two dozen sporadic users (at least the ones of which I am aware who speak English). It is not quite alive but not quite dead, and I am worried about the future this may be signaling for all decentralized networks.

Several factors have contributed to ZeroNet's gradual decline: significant structural security problems, a susceptibility to spamming, the successful blocking of Russian and Chinese citizens' access to the Tor and BitTorrent trackers upon which ZeroNet relies, the "disappearance" of the founder and chief coder Thomas Kocsis early in 2020, and squabbling over the direction of the network. Basically, users have lost confidence in just about every aspect of ZeroNet--the state of its code, the support it is receiving from its few remaining developers, its usability, and its level of user anonymity via the Tor network. ZeroNet relies completely on Tor for maintaining the anonymity of its users, but for a couple of years Tor has been slower and increasingly difficult to connect to. Sometimes I can't connect at all. And some ZeroNet zites are prone to breaking via highly esoteric mechanisms. Although a handful of people still seem to be using one of the ZeroNet forums I created a few years ago, due to some mysterious technical problem, I have not been able to post anything to it in over six months, and not enough knowledgeable people remain on the network to help me fix my "zites" when they break. My other ZeroNet forum still works fine, so I have decided to continue posting to it occasionally until it stops working too.

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