4 ms·

Limewire was mostly run by a niche set of users?

• dajohnson89 10y ago
  Relative to how ubiquitous Facebook et al is, yes.
  • niftich 10y ago
    Limewire, Bittorrent, and its ilk were fairly mainstream in the same way that driving over the speed limit, recreational drug use, and jaywalking are; and like these things it was often afoul of the law. So as enforcement got better and legal alternatives emerged, their 'popularity' declined. There are also people who share Netflix logins, which is a (grey-market) option for those with no money, but is vastly less likely to result in DMCA notices mailed out to you. If anything, the various decentralized networks of the 1990-2000s were the products of organic demand. There is simply less demand now than there was, or that demand is being suppressed by other mechanisms (such as laws, in the case of copyright-infringing sharing). Perhaps there's just not a lot of demand for hosting your own identity in some decentralized, federated social network.