> worth compromising the design of a network
That depends on what the design of the network is.
In my mind Freenet is too free for reasons discussed in sibling comments (but in short, literally no safeguards against Not Safe For Life content, by design).
For me, practically, federation provides a far improved middle ground. People can still freely distribute content without being beholden to any particular middle man, but there is more visibility afforded to node operators about what they're hosting and they therefore can both remove content that they don't want to be hosting and remove users from their network who are making problems.
Gossip protocols are another solution which also works for similar reasons.
Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.
That depends on what the design of the network is.
In my mind Freenet is too free for reasons discussed in sibling comments (but in short, literally no safeguards against Not Safe For Life content, by design).
For me, practically, federation provides a far improved middle ground. People can still freely distribute content without being beholden to any particular middle man, but there is more visibility afforded to node operators about what they're hosting and they therefore can both remove content that they don't want to be hosting and remove users from their network who are making problems.
Gossip protocols are another solution which also works for similar reasons.
Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.