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?