NeoModus Direct Connect

» see neo-modus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The last real page neo-modus.com ever served is dated 1 April 2005 and it still has its numbers in it. Current Amount of Public Users: 407518. Current Amount of Available Data: 16566.99 TB. Those were live counters, pulled off the hub network every time somebody loaded the page, and they sit frozen at whatever the network happened to be doing on the day the site stopped being updated.

Jon Hess started NeoModus in November 1999, while he was still in high school, and the thing he built is one of the few peer-to-peer systems of that era that was a design rather than a Napster reskin. Direct Connect had no central index. It had hubs, each one run by whoever felt like running one, each with its own rules and its own chat, and the transfers happened directly between the two machines involved so the hub only ever paid for conversation.

The 2005 front page is still pitching against the competition by name. Tired of other file-sharing communities such as KaZaA, Gnutella, and WinMX? The copyright line under it reads 2001, four years stale. The signature at the bottom reads Jon Hess and the Direct Connect Community, which by then was the more accurate half of the sentence.

This one had a door policy and I could not meet it. Hubs enforced a minimum share, so before a hub would let you in you had to be offering some number of gigabytes back, and the good hubs set that number high on purpose. On a Turkish home line between 2002 and 2005 that was two problems at once: a disk that did not hold enough to qualify, and an upstream that made you a bad neighbor even if it did. The internet cafe was worse, because nothing on that machine was yours to share. By the time TTNet broadband made the arithmetic work here, around 2006, this client had already been dead for a year.

~ the record ~

~ what a hub was ~

A hub was somebody's server with a name and a topic and a set of rules posted in the chat window. Universities ran them across campus networks, where the local bandwidth was free and enormous. Countries with good national peering ran them for the same reason. Because a hub operator could see everyone's shared list, hubs turned into curated places, organized by subject, with operators who would kick you for sharing incomplete downloads.

That was the difference from everything else in the category. Kazaa and WinMX handed you a global search box and no community. Direct Connect handed you a room with an operator in it, and getting into the room was the hard part. It scaled badly and it moderated well, which is the opposite trade from almost everything else that decade.

~ the banner in the client ~

NeoModus paid for itself with advertising served inside the client window. This was completely normal in 2001 and completely intolerable by 2003, and it is the single reason the original client lost its own network.

Jacek Sieka started DC++ in 2001 as a free and open source client speaking the same protocol to the same hubs, with no ads of any kind. Users did not have to switch networks or leave their hubs or lose anything. They just changed which program they opened. Within a few years the network Jon Hess designed was running almost entirely on somebody else's client, and NeoModus had no revenue line left to defend.

~ it publishes in french now ~

The archive brackets the ending to a few months. On 1 April 2005 the front page was still 6,122 bytes with the counters running. On 2 July 2005 the address answered with an HTTP 200 and an empty body. By 1 October 2005 it was serving 298 bytes: a frameset whose title read KWOON: Now on DVD, advertising a film where a file-sharing client used to be.

After that came the parking pages and the frame-killer scripts that domains of that vintage collect. Today neo-modus.com is a French WordPress site publishing consumer articles about money and health, with its uploads sitting under a path numbered site 72, which tells you it is one entry in somebody's network of content properties. The address that once reported sixteen petabytes of other people's hard drives now runs on a template.

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