Hacker News

Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It

69 points by rickcarlino 4 days ago | 16 comments

kderbe 53 minutes ago

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!

gitowiec 26 minutes ago

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

chuckadams 37 minutes ago

Hot take: the simple reason Gnutella declined is that it was replaced by Bittorrent.

outside1234 8 minutes ago

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.

bellowsgulch 3 days ago

That’s what Limewire used? It definitely came pre-bootstrapped then.

rickcarlino 2 days ago

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.

bragr 6 minutes ago

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.

itsthecourier 3 days ago

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

felooboolooomba 2 hours ago

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.

leeoniya 2 hours ago

or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?

netsharc 58 minutes ago

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..

chuckadams 35 minutes ago

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.

throwawaysoxjje 34 minutes ago

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

rrgok 48 minutes ago

Shareaza was the goat. It had 4 or 5 protocols.

culi 49 minutes ago

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

thiscatis 2 hours ago

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.

ryanshrott 2 days ago

[flagged]