This graph shows the complete known monthly openpeers from 2010 through August 2018, with a moving average. Also included in the graph are captions for events that may have encouraged or discouraged Freenet use.

Certain months from 2010, 2011, and July 2015 are unavailable - instead, a gray bar displaying the average for that year is used for those months.

Captions:

Jan 2010: Wikileaks begins publishing classified data sent to them by US Army soldier Chelsea Manning.
Jul 2010: The infamous "collateral murder" video, which features US military killing civilians, is published by Wikileaks.
Sep 2011: Wikileaks publishes the last of the US diplomatic cables.
Jun 2013: Edward Snowden's leaks about NSA surveillance.
Jan 2015: Black Ice Project: US law enforcement agencies were using modified Freenet nodes to arrest people in possession of child pornography.
Aug 2015: Developer The_Seeker's equipment seized by law enforcement, which led to the loss of Freenet and FMS seednodes.
Mar 2016: Build 1471 caused problems for Java 6 users. Build 1472 was the last to support Java 6. Users of Java 6 prior to 1472 had to upgrade to Java 7 and manually change Freenet's upgrade settings. Those who kept Java 6, or subsequently upgraded Java without changing Freenet's settings, received no updates and were forked from the network.
May 2016: Spam and DoS attacks against Frost boards ("Frostbite").
Nov 2017: Freenet build 1479 released, which introduced better speed and efficiency at the expense of a lower number of maximum connections. Many users were confused or unhappy over their reduced number of connections.