Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was. Users showed up because the protocol solved real problems at scale and the solution just so happened to be decentralized. No one ever pretended to use Gnutella in hopes their GnutellaCoinTM would go up in value later. They just downloaded MP3s. The network exploded in popularity, then plateaued for almost a decade, then settled into a permanent long tail state of continued but diminished use.
Welcome to my overly enthusiastic love letter to Gnutella.
↫ Rick Carlino
I genuinely didn’t know – or I had forgotten, more likely – that Gnutella formed the backbone of LimeWire, another name I haven’t heard in a long time. I’m quite sure I used LimeWire over 25 years ago, but details are fuzzy and I might be confusing it with other filesharing networks of a similar vintage. I was an avid CD buyer and MiniDisc user (I used MD well into the smartphone age), so I didn’t have much need for downloading MP3s.
Gnutella is also apparently still active, and there are still clients you can download and use. Of course, it’s a mere shadow of its former self, but this, too, was news to me. I’m kind of inclined to see if it’s still hosting MP3s.
I used this when it first came out, but there is a reason the world moved beyond Gnutella very quickly.
It was created by the folks that gave us WinAmp, btw. Those were wizards.
Even if obsolete, their work should be celebrated.
That being said, Gnutella has major glaring issues (from the tip of my head)
1. There is no hierarchy, the entire network is flat
2. That means the entire “routing” is flat, every query goes to every node
3. There is no multi-peer download / sharing
4. There is no proper hash based distribution
5. There is no security
6. And basic functions like “resume” did not work properly
And of course “freeloader” problem. You basically never had to share anything.
It gave us the first true peer-to-peer network. But it was quickly replaced with betters (like Kazaa/Limeware, but more of eDonkey, and later BitTorrent)
There is not much material neither in Gnutella nor in Gnutella2. Nowadays only emule and bittorrent are relevant. Even Direct Connect that I used to use a lot is half dead.
We will always have BeShare 😉
Morgan,
I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but it’s not coming up in my searches.
I remember bearshare, I checked and it’s defunct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BearShare
BTW Soulseek is still very active nowadays, and its unofficial open source GTK client Nicotine+ is great.
One of the killer features for P2P networks is scaling up like nothing else could. P2P is so much better than centralized file sharing services, many of which want to charge for inferior service. Even google drive and microsoft onedrive are bottlenecked next to P2P. But P2P’s heyday is over because for better or worse P2P keeps being used for copyright material and then the lawyers keep scaring users with intense legal notices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/15hhm6s/isp_copyright_infringement_notice/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/fighting-renewed-attempts-make-isps-copyright-cops-2025-review
Copyright monitoring services connect as a peer on P2P networks, log activity, and then dispatch notices to the user’s ISP. In the US ISPs will forward copyright notices and eventually shut down your service or unmask people’s identities to the copyright lawyers.
Ironically centralized file sharing & content distribution services have less legal accountability because they operate under safe harbor provisions in the law. They have to take down content in a timely way of course, but they’re not legally accountable, which is why ironically sometimes there’s more copyright material on youtube and it’s safer for users to download than on P2P networks.