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?