I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is an ambitious project that is driven by (of course slow paced) academic research. This is very serious and is of course actively not giving a fuck about current mainstream trends in software engineering.<p>It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet strives to imagine and implement a networking stack that is mostly friend-to-friend, eg a network where the topology is dictated by the real life trust relationships (just as most old low-level protocol did, think bgp). It wants to support delay-tolerant and low bandwidth networks that exist outside of our privileged western world, have privacy protections on the routing level, etc etc.<p>It is politically ambitious since much of it is deeply anti-commercial, striving for local self-management (and that on several stacked levels). In particular it strives to have an architecture that defuses the network effect that comes with walled gardens. Applications built on top will probably do the exact opposite of the neuropsychology-based methods of drawing attention that is being used in almos every single mainstream private <i>and free software</i> web application. Imho there is limited value in reimplementing all these mechanisms like suggestions, notifications, infinite stream based information architecture (think mastodon) that have negative aspects on the content (superficial and intellectually aggressive content) and negative aspects as a tool (no decent archiving or information retrieval).<p>So yeah, this is very much in progress, but GNUnet as a whole is currently federating a lot of academic (and non-academic but still very much based on experimental science methods) work, it's already a gold mine of papers, thesis, experimental protocols, foundations for radically different applications, etc. Please take the time to go deeper than just the front page, it is really worth the time (this is a website, not a marketing page, you have to actually explore it to understand what it's about).