Understanding Small World Networks
In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an influential experiment that revealed something amazing about human relationships. Milgram chose people at random in cities like Kansas and gave each a letter with the address of someone they didn’t know in Boson, Massachusetts. They were instructed to get the letter to that person but only by sending it to someone they know personally, who would send it to someone they know personally - and so on. Milgram repeated this letter-sending experiment nearly 200 times. On average, these letters reached their target in just six steps, this is where we get the term ‘six degrees of separation.’ Milgram’s findings demonstrated that despite the vastness of the world, most individuals are only a few links away from each other, highlighting the surprisingly small number of intermediaries connecting us all.
Freenet uses principles similar to those observed in Milgram’s experiment to efficiently locate information in a decentralized way. Each node in Freenet is connected to a limited number of other nodes, and much like in a small world social network, this network structure allows data to be found with minimal hops, even when the network scales to millions of nodes. This efficient discovery mechanism is what makes Freenet both decentralized and highly scalable.
