Editing Hyphanet (section)

===Effect===
[[File:Freenet datastore specialisation.ani.gif|thumb|450px|right|The effect of the node specialising on the particular location.]]
Initially, the locations in darknet are distributed randomly. This means that routing of requests is essentially random. In opennet connections are established by a join request which provides an optimized network structure if the existing network is already optimized.<ref name=Roos2014>{{cite book|last1=Roos|first1=Stefanie|title=Measuring Freenet in the Wild: Censorship-Resilience under Observation|date=2014|publisher=Springer International Publishing|isbn=978-3-319-08505-0|pages=263–282|url=https://freenetproject.org/papers/roos-pets2014.pdf|access-date=15 September 2015|ref=Roos2014|archive-date=16 November 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141116144052/https://freenetproject.org/papers/roos-pets2014.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> So the data in a newly started Freenet will be distributed somewhat randomly.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Freenet Project Documentation |url=https://freenetproject.org/ |access-date=2022-04-20 |website=freenetproject.org |language=en |archive-date=16 February 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110216062257/http://freenetproject.org/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

As location swapping (on darknet) and path folding (on opennet) progress, nodes which are close to one another will increasingly have close locations, and nodes which are far away will have distant locations. Data with similar keys will be stored on the same node.<ref name=Roos2014 />

The result is that the network will self-organize into a distributed, clustered structure where nodes tend to hold data items that are close together in key space. There will probably be multiple such clusters throughout the network, any given document being replicated numerous times, depending on how much it is used. This is a kind of "[[spontaneous symmetry breaking]]", in which an initially symmetric state (all nodes being the same, with random initial keys for each other) leads to a highly asymmetric situation, with nodes coming to specialize in data that has closely related keys.{{citation needed|date=July 2013}}

There are forces which tend to cause clustering (shared closeness data spreads throughout the network), and forces that tend to break up clusters (local caching of commonly used data). These forces will be different depending on how often data is used, so that seldom-used data will tend to be on just a few nodes which specialize in providing that data, and frequently used items will be spread widely throughout the network. This automatic mirroring counteracts the times when [[web traffic]] becomes overloaded, and due to a mature network's intelligent routing, a network of size ''n'' should require only log(''n'') time to retrieve a document on average.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.networxsecurity.org/members-area/glossary/f/freenet.html|title=FreeNet|website=networxsecurity.org|access-date=25 January 2019|archive-date=26 January 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190126001007/https://www.networxsecurity.org/members-area/glossary/f/freenet.html|url-status=live}}</ref>