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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

> 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.

The high seas have never been better.