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Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

rickcarlino.com

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Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#21

Post by swax »

I did a client called Gnucleus back in the day, the original website is still up at https://gnucleus.org/ I also designed GWebCache with a friend in college (also the IRC caching before that was me, I'm sorry). I think in the end the cost/benefit of the Gnutella architecture wasn't there. Especially in privacy - too much of a liability exposing your machine to serve files and route traffic. Also the efficiency of search over the Gnutella architecture - your query never hit all the peers.

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.

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#23

Post by msm_ »

culi wrote: post #11
itsthecourier wrote: post #2

just reading gnutella triggered a really old memory of times when Ares, Limewire and eMule where places to try your luck getting mp3s and software

Docuwiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki) is still the most thorough source I've seen for niche documentaries. https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Category:Name It is all ed2k links. Unfortunately modern clients for ed2k are quite lacking

And yet it doesn't work without JS (I think it's because cloudflare WAF, but still)

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#24

Post by dlenski »

Great article. It's been almost 20 years since I've used Gnutella, but I seem to recall that, as flexible and resilient as it was, it had some pretty major issues with speed of queries and scaling to millions of users. I think Bittorrent become popular in the mid-to-late '00s in large part because its model of redundant copies scaled better than Gnutella.

> 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.

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#25

Post by rickcarlino »

swax wrote: post #21

I did a client called Gnucleus back in the day, the original website is still up at https://gnucleus.org/ I also designed GWebCache with a friend in college (also the IRC caching before that was me, I'm sorry). I think in the end the cost/benefit of the Gnutella architecture wasn't there. Especially in privacy - too much of a liability exposing your machine to serve files and route traffic. Also the efficiency of sea…

Thanks for dropping a comment! Collecting Gnutella history is a hobby of mine if the article did not make that apparent. I’ve seen a lot of your past work related to Gnucleus while researching the protocol and digging through old documents in archive.org. It always surprised me that the homepage was still online after so many years.

Are you still active in open source / decentralized tech these days?

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#26

Post by specproc »

pndy wrote: post #22
gitowiec wrote: post #16

Thank you for reminding me about this. Next to soulseek I'm going to use it to not obey!

Didn't soulseek had some requirements you had to fulfill before downloading?

I've used soulseek pretty recently! There's a nice client called nicotine, IIRC.

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.

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#28

Post by cwnyth »

msm_ wrote: post #23
culi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docuwiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki) is still the most thorough source I've seen for niche documentaries. https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Category:Name It is all ed2k links. Unfortunately modern clients for ed2k are quite lacking

And yet it doesn't work without JS (I think it's because cloudflare WAF, but still)

Once you get past Cloudfare, you can use it without JS.

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#29

Post by cwnyth »

itsthecourier wrote: post #2

just reading gnutella triggered a really old memory of times when Ares, Limewire and eMule where places to try your luck getting mp3s and software

BearShare, too, which also included pictures and video. I don't remember ever getting a virus from it, but I also kept extensions visible.

Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

#30

Post by hnlmorg »

throwawaysoxjje wrote: post #15
netsharc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just great how a decision made by some genius in Microsoft decades ago caused so much confusion and mess. Even on Windows 11 the default is to hide extensions, because, geez, wouldn't want to confuse people with change after decades of it being like that. 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 launch…

Macs originally didn’t have filename extensions because the file type was stored as metadata in the file system

That really is a superior way of doing things too. Or at least it would have been if that metadata were transferred with the file itself in all protocols.
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