I agree - competition from BitTorrent lowered Gnutella's popularity.
Another thing about BitTorrent - I go to the Pirate Bay right now and look at top 100 for music, and "Pink Floyd - Discography 1967-2014" is one of the top torrents - 2.86 gigs, 131 seen seeds, 10 seen partials (seeds means they have 100% of the blob). You can download all their albums if you want, or one album, or one song on one album. Also most bittorrent clients have anti-leech constraints, so someone might start out accepting and sharing any part of that blob, making the one song they want a high priority request for them - they get the song they want quicker but they're also contributing to the torrent while they're online. So this sort of thing has all kinds of benefits for the network.
Whereas Gnutella tends to be look for and get one song at a time.
Are you still active in open source / decentralized tech these days?
I also did a private decentralized system that was like WASTE+DHT around 2009 (https://github.com/swax/DeOps)
I often wonder why we don't go back to systems like WASTE now.
We all finally have the bandwidth.
You wouldn't want to share the resulting downloads (not only is the audio quality slightly degraded, but I imagine it's highly likely there would be audio watermarks), but when everybody can download straight from YouTube anyway with a minimum of hassle, why would you need to share anything other than a video URL?
Of course, a big part of why this is so simple is because of the massive amount of work that the downloader client devs put into working around YouTube's attempts to stop this. I imagine it can be a difficult job.
If YouTube ever win the battle against the downloader clients, I imagine the landscape will change again. Maybe Gnutella will make a comeback.
Music is a big part of my life and I've found great joy in discovering new music. To give it a start, here are some suggestions from across genres of good music written after 2010:
- Classical:
- David Bruce - Gumboots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRIDt_4Xloc
- Anna Clyne - Masquerade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOchchAuWk
- Jazz (one of my personal favourites, and too many subgenres to count):
- Ai Kuwabara - Bet Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgyCpJ9FxCU
- Brad Mehldau - Everything in Its Right Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omF16-qbmeM
- Kamasi Washington - The Magnificent 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCnP5Z7Vn1E
- Prog, metal, & friends:
- Porcupine Tree - Dignity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3UhjiXG5m0
- Haken - Falling Back to Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adHGrSP43QE
- Tigran Hamasyan - Drip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7j7bdEPSd0
- The Ocean - Into the Uncanny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrpf51-WfH8
- The Dear Hunter - Magic Beans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8i19Lsw34M
- Funk
- Vulfpeck - Back Pocket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG96RttfZtM
- Pop rock
- Hannah Gil - Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr64XFAMANY
- Melt - Sour Candy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z133wUm-WZ0
- Follies & Vices - Red Wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdaU_NkUWBI
- Sammy Rae & The Friends - Good Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vCdmd99Cx8
- Punk & punk rock:
- Father of Peace - Enemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcfO9ENSYAQ
- Turnstile - BIRDS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_qhk_sqr5w
- Local H - TURN THE BOW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBtXJbgNCkA
Basically, if you open the log window and look at the peer messages, then beyond certain network size all you'd see was a flood of relayed search queries with duplicates that ground all other activity to the halt. And the whole thing just became unusable.
PS. Also, Gnutella was released almost to the day when some clause of the AOL's purchase contract of Nullsoft (stock option vesting?) has expired so the devs were ultimately free to do whatever the f they wanted. So released the file sharing app. That was a nice touch.
That was LimeWire connections and other clients like BearShare and gtk-gnutella and possibly Gnucleus that obeyed the new protocol requirements. Others were kept in a sequestered network and deprioritized.
> The Gnutella project began as an internal demo that leaked to the public after its corporate overlord, AOL, cancelled the project.
I don't think it was actually a leak in the usual sense of the word. There was no unauthorized release; rather, AOL didn't really understand what their new subsidiary was releasing.
As I understand it, Gnutella was written as a new project by Justin Frankel, the author of Winamp (which probably did more to popularize using computers to listen to music than anything else!), during or shortly after the sale of Winamp and Nullsoft to AOL. It was probably a chaotic time, and a massive culture clash between this big behemoth of a late-'90s tech and communications company, and this small startup of Early Internet Nerds.
Nullsoft's new corporate overlords probably didn't understand what they were creating: a new file-sharing/music-piracy program that would be like Napster, but more decentralized and resilient.
Frankel/Nullsoft released Gnutella and it was downloaded by thousands of people immediately. Perhaps friends in the recording industry called AOL execs, or in some other way they finally understood what it was, and AOL shut down the downloads less than a day later and cancelled the planned open-source code release, but due to its decentralization the network kept running, and it was soon reverse engineered.
As far as I know, the source code of the original Windows implementation of Gnutella never leaked.
Really? Not going to mention bit torrent?
Gnutella died because bit torrent took over in popularity. Bit torrent only did the parts that scaled pretty well, so it wasn't a true replacement, but it turned out that its difficult to go after index sites in foreign countries, so nobody minded putting index sites back on the http web.
There are message bots that spam you with racist abuse if you're sharing nothing (i.e. not even your downloads), but that's about it.
Myself used IRC XDCC bots connected to my 33k modem connected to my 486DX which would disconnect every three hours.
eDonkey, WinMX, lovely fashionable protocols.
The high seas have never been better.
Opera browser at one point included a personal webserver built in called Opera Unite. This webserver was accessed by the public through the free web proxy service that Opera also integrated. That way your personal home computer hosted website was behind an Opera IP address. It was all automagic. I really wish it had caught on. Simple static only hosting is a very small attack surface.
Firefox recently started offering VPN services built in to the browser. I think this is the perfect time to try to bring back static personal webservers in the web browser.
Bittorrent offloaded the distributed search onto websites which routinely got sued or shutdown. Funnily enough, one of my big improvements to Gnutella in the first year of LimeWire was to drive out the website users because they were overwhelming the network upload capabilities without adding to them. That improved the 90% download failures in 2001 but interesting to wonder what if we had gone another way.
For me the biggest problem is authenticity. On most of the decentralized P2P networks of that time is that you never know what you are getting. Look for some Disney movie, get porn. Very common back in the days. Of course you also had all the malware, scams, etc... More generally, it didn't do much to incentive good behavior (sharing).
Bittorrent, with its private trackers had some accountability, ratios, etc... The protocol itself favors peers that give the most in return.
just found it on youtube now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSRLf30lj0M), and i'm excited to see another commenter was there for the same reason!
Fear and loathing in Las Vagas (took a week to download) = Granny porn. Sigh
Plus, always fun to get laughed for mistyping The Almond Brothers Band at 3am...
Searching took ages (if you got any results back at all), and when you tried to download something it took ages to even start, dripping through your dial-up internet like molasses. EDonkey on the other hand was quick. The first search results usually arrived within seconds (granted, it took equally long to get all search results), and usually downloads started (slowly) after a few seconds to 1 or 2 minutes.
I don't know if this was because of popularity (more peers in ed2k so faster download speeds) or if it was a particular problem with dial-up internet (Gnutella worked better for people with fast internet, like at universities etc., at least from what I heard back then)
Although, was the hiding something that the Mac introduced?
The idea of the last part of the filename (after the period) determining what program is launched to handle the file is odd anyway...
I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..
I challenge you to suggest a better solution - the best that Linux came up with is a giant database of all magic numbers known to God and praying that something matches... sometimes it does, and sometimes it even matches the correct program.
hiding information from user is not good by any means
why not?
power to the people. At worst it just breaks. At best you get filetype chamelions that are straight up cool, yet harmless
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Category:Name
It is all ed2k links. Unfortunately modern clients for ed2k are quite lacking
holy smokes you're right!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Gorton
Oh well.
I swear I think we're living in the episode of TNG with the brain worms every day now.
BitTorrent was designed with the good parts like decentralized file transfer, and ditched the decentralized search - simplified with a centralized website/tracker model that can also be members only. That helped people stay more under the radar, as well as allow people to jump on/off to get what they want.
Ultimately the better balance which is why BitTorrent is still going strong today, but there is some nostalgia for the craziness of a single global network. Where people can freely share all their stuff, and downloading/opening files was like rolling the dice.