eDonkey2000

» see edonkey2000.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i used the edonkey network around 2003 through 2005. not the official metamachine client, almost nobody i knew did. emule was the one that ran on every windows desktop in turkey, and emule spoke the same protocol. ed2k:// links got passed around on msn the way youtube urls would later. you clicked one, the queue moved at 56k speed for a long time before broadband finally landed in 2006.

metamachine launched edonkey2000 on september 6 2000, three months before napster lost its first court ruling. the difference from napster was simple. napster pulled a file from one user at a time. edonkey pulled it from many users at once, hashing each chunk so a thousand people who had the same album could each donate a piece. this was the swarming model that bittorrent would later refine. jed mccaleb wrote the first version. sam yagan came in to run the company.

the supreme court killed it indirectly. mgm v grokster came down in june 2005 and said you could sue any service that induced users to infringe, even one with no central server. the riaa sent metamachine a cease and desist three months later. by september 28 the official client was gone and the homepage was a takedown notice. the network itself outlived the company by years because emule was a separate project on a separate codebase, run by volunteers, harder to sue.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the value for a 56k user in turkey was file size. napster had been a song-by-song service. kazaa would let you grab one mp3 at a time. edonkey and emule were the apps you used to download a whole album, a whole discography, a whole season of a tv show, a dvd image of a movie. the swarming meant your download did not die when one source disconnected. you set the queue overnight and woke up to two hundred megabytes of new music.

turkish broadband took a long time to arrive at the home level, and even on ttnet adsl the country was metered, throttled, and oversubscribed. edonkey worked best on those conditions. it would wait. it would resume. it did not need a permanent connection to a central server. you could leave it running for a week to grab one rip and that was a normal pattern.

~ the slide ~

the metamachine business model had been to license a paid overnet client and run advertising on the free one. neither worked. the official edonkey client was always less popular than emule, which was free and open source and had a less hostile interface. by 2004 emule was the dominant client on the network metamachine had built but did not really own. when the cease and desist arrived in 2005 the company shut its product and left the protocol to its parasite.

~ what got buried with it ~

the ed2k network is technically still alive in 2026 if you look for it. a handful of servers run and the protocol works. emule downloads in 2026 the same way it downloaded in 2004. nobody i know uses it. what got buried was the patience. you used to start an album download on a friday and check it sunday afternoon. streaming made that wait disappear, and with it went the relationship people had with a specific file sitting in a specific folder. usually named the wrong way, often missing the last thirty seconds. still yours though.

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