My Story with P2P

I am not going to talk about P2P (peer-to-peer) in general or its functions; I'll just say that P2P refers to person-to-person sharing programs. I will limit myself to sharing my own journey with them. They are famous because they are fought against by those "acting within the law," who accuse these programs of encouraging piracy (that is, the illegality of many files) or serving as a means to promote it. Regardless, not everything shared on a P2P network is illegal or should be—they are used by millions of people around the world.

My history with P2P started around 2001. I had a dial-up phone connection (56kb); it disconnected frequently and was extremely slow.

By that time, Napster was already famous. I think it was the first P2P program—at least the first well-known one to go mainstream. I never actually got to use it. From the little I remember and read, Napster lost its legal battle and could no longer be used. Clones of the program appeared immediately, but they didn't achieve the success of the original.

Around then, someone had told me about Audiogalaxy. One day I finally worked up the courage to download and try it, and from the moment I discovered these programs, I was hooked. Audiogalaxy required you to register on their website and then download a very simple little program. You would go to their site, use their internal search engine to look for the song you wanted, check its user rating, select it, and the program would start automatically and download the song for you.

It was a very popular program, just like Napster. Its drawback was that it used a central server, which acted as an intermediary between the two people sharing the song—the one providing it and the one receiving it.

Audiogalaxy also lost its legal battle and switched to a paid-song model. Later, it was discovered that Audiogalaxy contained spyware, which was a novel concept at the time. Audiogalaxy had fallen from grace, and I don't think it ever regained its former popularity, much like what happened to Napster.
It was common to hear and read new terminology as you dove deeper into the topic; new concepts were constantly emerging: networks, P2P, file sharing, nodes, clients, etc. And these networks were distinct from one another. One that I knew very little about, but which was heavily used by others, was the Gnutella network.

A vast number of file-sharing programs were born—some worked very well, while others didn't work at all. That's how I discovered Kazaa, and there was also Grokster (or something like that), which was the German version. A friend suggested using it, and from then on, there was no stopping us. By that time, I had a 256kb broadband connection, but my hard drive was small, so I ran into that limitation: I downloaded a lot, but I couldn't enjoy as much of it as I wanted.

Aside from Kazaa, there were others I tried but didn't like or didn't give enough time to get to know, such as iMesh and BearShare, among others.

Shareaza had many interesting options, but very few files to share; apparently, nothing surpassed Kazaa. I had read that in some parts of the world, Kazaa was considered legal, while in a few others, it was outside the law. I think this helped its popularity tremendously.

I discovered WinMX; it had a strange but attractive interface and a lot of files. Once you started searching, you couldn't stop—rare items that were hard to find on other programs would show up. However, it had a waiting queue, which made downloads slow—an almost unbearable wait.

It was later discovered that many of these P2P file-sharing programs came bundled with spyware.
Another great one I discovered around that time was Soulseek, completely by chance one day while testing programs. I really liked it. It had a waiting queue, but once it started downloading, it wouldn't stop, and it allowed you to download entire folders. It was focused on music, so there were virtually no other file types, but you always depended on the other person—it was P2P in its purest form: one-on-one and nothing else.

Another network was BitTorrent. This program, from its original version (which is the one I started using), was very simple. It was meant more for large files, but it had few users at first. Later, I used one of its variants—a "client" called ABC. ABC was very good, mostly for large files, but BitTorrent never really appealed to me.

Around 2004 or 2005, I discovered Ares. It was very good and simple, but it didn't have the volume of files that Kazaa had, though it kept growing over time.

One program I hadn't used and decided to give a chance to back in 2004 or 2005 was eMule. People talked about it endlessly on countless forums and websites—some reporting issues, others praising its wonders. I had tried it twice before, but I didn't understand it or know how to use it. Back then, I had zero patience because my connection restarted or dropped frequently, which prevented the program from running properly. But around 2006–2007, I gave it another try with a bit of patience, and hands down, it was the best. Once I got the hang of it, it proved to be the absolute best P2P software available.

Several of these P2P programs transitioned to paid models, but I suspect free file-sharing programs still have a long life ahead of them.

For a time, they declined in usage and lost popularity due to the rise of direct upload/download sites. However, the recent legal crusade against some of the most famous download sites has allowed for a revival of P2P software. As of 2014, in my opinion, eMule (a variant of eDonkey) takes all the prizes for quality and quantity of content.