Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too

Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too difficult for "normal users", the web-UIs offered by typical home routers didn't make it easy enough. NAT traversal methods exist, but from my experience they are generally unreliable and/or slow. I still remember the days when P2P connections over the internet "just worked, always" (the early Napster/Kazaa days), and then it went to "it works sometimes", and finally to "almost never works (except if the service offers some kind of middle-man datacenter to bounce the connections between the two NAT'd peers)". Try to do a IRC DCC file transfer with anyone these days and see what I mean... long ago, it "just worked". I blame today's unfortunate centralization of internet services largely on NAT breaking P2P connectivity. Who knows, maybe spread of IPv6 will fix this mess... some day...