Another traveler of the wireways.
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Beware that iirc, unlike Tor an[d] I2P, Freenet leaks your IP, so I recommend to use a VPN.
If it’s using basic peer-to-peer tech, I suspect you may be right. Been awhile since I looked into it, and as I recall it wasn’t really built for privacy so much as another way to share info with few limitations (hence the free in freenet), so it’d make sense if it did.
In case anyone thinks this is a fiction reference or something, it’s not. Kinda interesting project tbh, came across someone with a Gemini link in their profile on Mastodon the other day and it got me curious.
My knowledge is similarly limited, but fwiw I think you’re more or less correct on what you’ve reasoned about your first question. Regarding the second, this is going to vary for each federated service and what’s involved, e.g. on Mastodon your social graph (who you follow, who follows you) may be either public or private depending on your settings.
As to whether instances have lists of subscribed communities (or channels/followed users/etc.), I think you may be right as well as this is how the All/Federated/Other servers feeds are produced. However on private messages, they are absolutely not end to end encrypted on any fediverse service that I’m aware. It’s much better to call these direct messages or mentioned people only (depending on context) rather than private, as many of the services that permit this form of messaging are really doing just that, simply making a public post only visible to the mentioned or directly messaged individual.
In other words, the fediverse is not really suited to private communications unless it’s explicitly described as such (e.g. end to end encrypted channels/spaces on Matrix instances), so it’s still better to use services like Signal or the like for private comms.
Regarding your third question, I don’t know enough on this to comment.
Hope this helps, and if I’m mistaken on any of these, please correct me as I’m also interested in learning more on this subject!
I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.
So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.
Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.