Reading into the new Freenet (I haven't kept up with this shit for years), it appears it is a distributed virtual machine like Ethereum but is inconsistent by design by forgoing consensus and instead relying on each "contract" to have mergeable states such that once all states propagate to all nodes they all come to the same state (i.e. state changes are path-independent and can be in any order, like addition of state deltas). The whole small network model Freenet 2 has going for it is superior to Ethereum and other distributed virtual machines for path-independent programs and data storage, but the requirement that state changes have to not be strictly dependent on the order of past states really restrict the possible applications you can build on it (otherwise you don't have a consistent state across all nodes, which can lead to vulnerabilities like double spending).

Things that necessarily rely on a order of events like an decentralized exchange or a cryptocurrency cannot ever be put on this network due to this issue, but it seems like a great solution for things that don't really care about order like message boards or instant chatting. It's actually pretty neat stuff, but I don't really see it getting popular since most nontrivial applications are reliant on the order of past events in some way and thus cannot be built such that the states can be added in any order. Unless those applications are fine with inconsistency across nodes, this makes this whole solution ripe for all kinds of footguns and problems. It's more of a subset of Web2 than a Web3, it simply cannot replace the centralized web because of the lack of consensus between nodes.

Thank you for reading my rambling blog, it's nice to get my thoughts out everyone!