this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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I never used LimeWire I'm not old enough for that, what is it that people remember so fondly about it anyway? Was there something that made it special or is it just another torrent client?
FWIW Limewire was not a torrent client, at least not for a long time.
The Napster era of P2P file sharing used centralized servers for indexing and querying the content available: it was a much simpler system than torrents, but much less robust.
So your torrent search site and your torrent client were essentially bundled together within a desktop app. Again simpler: you could just tell someone what program to download and they were off to the races. Great for word of mouth when the web was still underdeveloped.
What came up when you searched was essentially whatever was in the shared folders of whoever happened to be online at the time. So it was even more of a wild west with essentially no moderation.
Overall worse than torrents in almost every way, but it was a fun weird time to be online. I personally went from Napster to KaZaA to Limewire before ultimately moving on to torrents.
LimeWire was based on Gnutella protocol, which was actually the first major P2P file sharing protocol. The file discovery was completely decentralised. But yes, way simpler and less robust than BitTorrent.