You might be thinking of Solid led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.

this is too perfect

Commenting to indicate my shared interest in this (despite the other comments suggesting the unlikelihood of such an option emerging).

How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

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.

Ghost Commander may work for this. I’ve not tried sftp myself, but on opening it I do see the option there, so it might be worth a try.

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.