An interesting post, Smoke!
Quote:
Originally posted by Smoketoomuch
But then, my problems are much older then that. First and foremost, I saw not many posts about this, but the fact is, that connected to 450000 users sharing 642313 files or whatever is simply misleading. You are never connected to that many users. U are connected to a small segment of Fasttrack network, and multiple searches for the same stuff won’t let you out from that segment. As borgdrone1of2 (I hope it was him, if you remember differently, please correct me) said on old forum> there is a good chance you download from someone from another continent (which is true, since most people I download from is from US) but a very small chance that you would be able to see the shared files of the guy living across the street. Which means that from our (the user’s) point of view the “connectedness” (sorry) was never as good as many would like to think (or would like us to think). My estimate is, based on availability (music, soft, vids), and even taking into consideration the leech problem, which is quite serious on fasttrack, the fasttrack network you are actually connected to is no bigger then winmx connected to frontcode and 2-3 high capacity (like 10000 users or above) network – but if you disregard leeches, and base your estimate only on availability, then the size roughly equals winmx connected just to the frontcode server.
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Good technical point. None of the decentralized clients/networks has yet managed to tackle the global connectivity problem satisfactorily. Whether on Gnutella, FastTrack or WPNP the users end up to localized 'pockets' where they can see some other users and their stuff but miss the great majority of users and whatever treasures they share. At its best Napster managed to provide a full connectivity (with search, browse and hotlist services) to a million people or so - bringing the whole mp3 sharing world into same virtual space and thereby making a lot of rare stuff available. The number of p2p users and the average size of their libraries have multiplied since and doing the trick in a centralized way á la Napster might already be unfeasible. It needs to be done in a decentralized way and I also trust it will be done so within a year or two.
- tg
