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.

[–] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The best thing about limewire was downloading "stupify" by Disturbed. Hitting play and it's some random song you have never heard before that absolutely slaps.

Or random wrong names songs then years later you go to a concert and hear random band number 2 playing and it's their song you got from lime wire years ago

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

The best thing about limewire was that it allowed downloading of video files and it became prevalent just as I became pubescent.

Morpheus was a fantastic successor.

[–] FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 weeks ago

I feel like it was a similar experience in the earlier days of torrenting. Nowadays it still happens but only from less reputable torrents. Though also it's been years since I ever torrented music. These days almost everything is online for download or can be downloaded or captured from a streaming service.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] mayhair@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 weeks ago

Seems pretty similar to how Soulseek is today.

[–] FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh so it wasn't really torrenting, just similar.

[–] zagaberoo@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly. Torrenting is just so much more powerful that it's become synonymous with file sharing as a whole.