[echelon]

2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

P2P was such an interesting part of internet history. It's a shame client-server prevailed over it.

Decentralized systems are so much more liberating. It felt like being a part of something rather than being a serf in someone's platform.

[1970-01-01]

>2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.

[anacrolix]

This. The tech works and is great. But it's not in the interests of the megacorps that took over from 2008ish onwards.

[dartos]

Well that and people seem to really enjoy (or at least feel compelled to use) social networks.

Social networks tend to be pretty difficult in p2p systems since the amount of traffic usually scales exponentially with network size (as posts get published to followers and shared over and over by the users of the network), which you’d want to maximize

[anacrolix]

I don't buy it. DHT systems have mechanisms to handle hotspots in the network.

[dartos]

There’s nothing to buy.

Say I have 100 followers and each of them have 100 followers.

Then say I make a post and all of my followers repost it.

That’s an explosion of updates that need to be sent around for 101 interactions.

These major social media platforms handle millions of interactions per second with accounts that have millions of followers and posts that get hundreds of thousands of reposts.

When there’s a centralized system, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets all their posts. Very little need to propagate every single update across every node in your whole network. From a user standpoint it’s seamless as well

It’s nothing unsolvable, but it’s much harder than a centralized social media platform while providing no visible benefit for the average, non technical, user.

[stavros]

What would you recommend these days? All I know is 2000s software like Shareaza, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc.

[niutech]

As a P2P Skype alternative, there are: Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat).

[morserer]

qBittorrent, any public tracker (pirate bay is still alive and well) or query the DHT directly using BTDigg for bonus points.

[qalmakka]

I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.

[Saris]

I wonder why NAT hole punching techniques never took off much with P2P, it seems like with enough work getting around NAT most of the time would be possible.

[qalmakka]

Good, reliable ways to do hole punching were not available until relatively late (STUN, ICE) and were somewhat finicky for a long time, especially on crappy routers.

Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable

[wickedsickeune]

You can't hole punch on mobile. Most mobile networks use symmetric NATs unfortunately.

[fuzztester]

Jini may be an example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini

I remember Bill Venners used to write about it on his site artima.com .