I know what you mean, but for this to be more widely used than Tor there is a need for me to know that nodes I operate only process stuff that won't be identified by 3rd party to sue me into a jail or financial ruin.

When I say whitelist, I do assume prefixes in the DHT (or whatever design they're using) can be used, as otherwise the whitelist may also grow too big to be practical. If however it will gain the concept of domains or such (which is also kinda a prefix), a whitelist will also be more practical.

Tor exit nodes are not operated by many in various places where they would/could because of concerns of the exit node addresses being enough to legally ruin operators' lives, even though technically it's a pure transit. Nobody sues the county because someone committed vehicular manslaughter on their public road. But because laws are skewed against the Internet right now, all someone needs is an exit node IP to make you regret.

If, and there's little to analyze/go by right now public, nodes and everyone is totally oblivious to what packets are transmitted; and if also the packets stored on nodes' disks are encrypted/sealed, then one could assume a filterless system to be practical.

This is all speculation, based on the little info there is. I really hope the team has come up with better designs that obliviate the concerns surrounding Tor, and ideally also not suffer from Freenet like slowness.

EDIT: Of course, once you have a filter, you will need to deal with the responsibility like Youtube does. If you do not know what's on disk or passing through, which is the ideal technically, then it would be best for the Internet and free communication. So, I'm not sure if a filter is a good idea, if that means you get subpoena'd and held liable for enabling one too many whitelist subscriptions.

I may be wrong, but my impression is they have more than one target audience. They want to hit the whole public, but also smaller groups who are having problems like government internet censorship.