It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.
Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.