Hi, thanks for the thoughtful questions.
You’re right that data remains in Freenet only as long as people are actively interacting with or hosting it. After that, it may eventually be removed. The key point is that Freenet is a communication medium with caching, not a storage medium.
That said, it only takes a single peer to keep a contract alive by continuing to host it. We call this pinning. As long as someone maintains a subscription to the contract, its state remains available.
You’re also correct that if a contract disappears entirely and someone later reintroduces an older state, that older state becomes the state others retrieve. There is no global database preserving history independently of participants.
Happy to clarify further, especially if you’re planning to write about it.
