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.
I remember Gnucleus and followed the release of Gnutella and used to read the old Gnutella Developer Forum on Yahoo where the major Gnutella clones hashed out the next steps for the network.
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.
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?
The main issue with Gnutella was - IIRC - that it didn't scale. At least the initial version, not sure if there was a revised one.
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.
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.
I would read a follow-up about LimeWire's dynamic query routing. I enjoyed the writing style very much and now I'm reading Rick's other articles on topics that normally wouldn't interest me. Thanks Rick!
I always find this kind of thing interesting. A protocol can outlive the companies, devices, and culture around it, mostly because nobody has to keep owning it for it to keep making sense.
Sure, but the attached chat rooms were pretty handy, I used to like to download bootlegged concerts back in the day, to find new ones you've never heard of.
Plus, always fun to get laughed for mistyping The Almond Brothers Band at 3am...
I don’t think that’s a hot take, BitTorrent learned from Gnutella and made a better protocol. Gnutella is important historically, but it had a lot of downsides as a protocol that BitTorrent improved on.
Nice writeup. It goes deep into Gnutella, but it's also worth mentioning the slew of sharing programs back then, which was truly like the wild west. Napster, Emule, DC++, Kazaa, to name a few. On many of these networks it was possible to literally browse other people's sharing folders, find really cool stuff, and maybe make some guesses on the what this user was like.
Are you asking if lime wire used Gnutella Web Cache for bootstrapping? I’m not sure. GWebCache is one of many possible ways to boot strap, and I have not run lime wire in over a decade. I saw that GTKGnutella moved off of GWebCache sometime ago and uses some sort UDP based tool now. I am fairly certain that Shareaza still uses it because I see those results come up in my Web cache pull from time to time. I have seen a few advertisements from lime wire fork projects as well.
If I recall, proprietary clients usually shipped with their own bootstrap server. I think it may have even contributed to the legal cases, but it's been a long time.
Back in the day as a teenager. Downloaded mp3 that was labelled with title and artist and .mp3 extension. It wasn't. What it was caused me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fkuc that shit. Apart from that, many good stuff was had.
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 launched to handle the file is odd anyway...
I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..
The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.
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.
Great memories of limewire but unfortunately its creator has gone full MAGA/MAHA, dropped all scientific knowledge he ever had by funding RFK Jr. and is even advocating cancelling child vaccination schedules.
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.
I remember Gnucleus and followed the release of Gnutella and used to read the old Gnutella Developer Forum on Yahoo where the major Gnutella clones hashed out the next steps for the network.
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.
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?
Yea, I'm working on a open source distributed, self-hosted agent runner https://naisys.org/
I also did a private decentralized system that was like WASTE+DHT around 2009 (https://github.com/swax/DeOps)
this is great!
I often wonder why we don't go back to systems like WASTE now.
We all finally have the bandwidth.
The main issue with Gnutella was - IIRC - that it didn't scale. At least the initial version, not sure if there was a revised one.
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.
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.
I would read a follow-up about LimeWire's dynamic query routing. I enjoyed the writing style very much and now I'm reading Rick's other articles on topics that normally wouldn't interest me. Thanks Rick!
I’m glad you liked it! I hope to publish the follow up soon
Is Bittorrent connected to this. Isn't that still going strong?
I always find this kind of thing interesting. A protocol can outlive the companies, devices, and culture around it, mostly because nobody has to keep owning it for it to keep making sense.
Hot take: the simple reason Gnutella declined is that it was replaced by Bittorrent.
Sure, but the attached chat rooms were pretty handy, I used to like to download bootlegged concerts back in the day, to find new ones you've never heard of.
Plus, always fun to get laughed for mistyping The Almond Brothers Band at 3am...
I don’t think that’s a hot take, BitTorrent learned from Gnutella and made a better protocol. Gnutella is important historically, but it had a lot of downsides as a protocol that BitTorrent improved on.
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.
Oh so pretty much the "classic" share something rule; that was pain in the ass in DC++ times but quality of whatever you could find there was best
DC++ now that's some nostalgia.
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.
Not to forget the eMule.
WinMX
Nice writeup. It goes deep into Gnutella, but it's also worth mentioning the slew of sharing programs back then, which was truly like the wild west. Napster, Emule, DC++, Kazaa, to name a few. On many of these networks it was possible to literally browse other people's sharing folders, find really cool stuff, and maybe make some guesses on the what this user was like.
That’s what Limewire used? It definitely came pre-bootstrapped then.
Are you asking if lime wire used Gnutella Web Cache for bootstrapping? I’m not sure. GWebCache is one of many possible ways to boot strap, and I have not run lime wire in over a decade. I saw that GTKGnutella moved off of GWebCache sometime ago and uses some sort UDP based tool now. I am fairly certain that Shareaza still uses it because I see those results come up in my Web cache pull from time to time. I have seen a few advertisements from lime wire fork projects as well.
If I recall, proprietary clients usually shipped with their own bootstrap server. I think it may have even contributed to the legal cases, but it's been a long time.
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
Back in the day as a teenager. Downloaded mp3 that was labelled with title and artist and .mp3 extension. It wasn't. What it was caused me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fkuc that shit. Apart from that, many good stuff was had.
or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?
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 launched to handle the file is odd anyway...
I wonder if the Windows spyware infrastructure measures what % of people turn off extension hiding..
The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.
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.
Nope. It had been renamed from .avi. CP.
BearShare, too, which also included pictures and video. I don't remember ever getting a virus from it, but I also kept extensions visible.
I still get spam emails on the one-off email address I used to sign up for Bearshare.
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
ed2k, nice! That reminds me of this superb piece of software: MLDonkey (https://github.com/ygrek/mldonkey), written in OCaml.
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.
Shareaza was the goat. It had 4 or 5 protocols.
It is still around! I see network traffic from it on major GWebCache instances.
Great memories of limewire but unfortunately its creator has gone full MAGA/MAHA, dropped all scientific knowledge he ever had by funding RFK Jr. and is even advocating cancelling child vaccination schedules.
Does that matter in terms of the software. It is GPL. Shows how good GPL is as an idea. Even if he went heavy pro big tech his code can still be used.
You can do that with any open source license.
~~who?~~
holy smokes you're right!
Looks like it's this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Gorton
Oh well.
I'm shocked! used to work for him ages ago.
I swear I think we're living in the episode of TNG with the brain worms every day now.