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.