Normally I would think a drop in replacement would mean I could switch to it and do everything the same as I was doing it. But my guess is that if I did this drop in replacement that little to none of the web activities I partake in would work anymore. So maybe my thoughts aren't quite what is meant.
The P2P aspect looks much better, but naturally there's the question of how this is differentiated from something like Tor with .Onion sites?
They're not contracts in the sense of a cryptocurrency, they're contracts in the sense that code and cryptography are used to control how data is used and updated in the system, similar to a database ACL, or object encapsulation in OOP.
This is a generalization of a concept called "signed subspace keys" in the original Freenet, which predated Bitcoin by almost a decade.
> The P2P aspect looks much better, but naturally there's the question of how this is differentiated from something like Tor with .Onion sites?
.Onion sites and services are still centralized, their server's location is just hidden by Tor. With the new Freenet the services themselves are entirely decentralized and can operate entirely independently of the person or people that created them.