[Mc91]

> My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out.

Gnutella started as this, but for a lot of reasons it didn't work for what it did, with every node sending broadcast to every other mode. The network became a number of federated super-nodes, or ultra-peers, or whatever you'd call them. These would be nodes that had a decent uptime, had a steady network connection, could handle a number of connections etc.