>this was limewire was born!

The screams of a thousand mp3.exe's being obliterated into the void

Yeah, Gnutella was very quickly pulled by AOL. There was no chance to see if Nullsoft would follow through and release the source (which they hinted at with the name Gnu-...).

In the short term there must have been folks unofficially hosting the installer, and probably substituting different bootstrap peers.

Quickly the protocol was reverse engineered and reimplemented, thanks to being text based, and maybe also due to users of IDA.

I found it a bit surprising, but Soulseek is still chugging along well too. :)

A centralized closed source file sharing network seems wildly "trust us" in 2023. Am I missing something? (yes, I see there is an OSS client)

Yes.....and that's what I like about it tbh. Decentralised stuff always has an overhead, and is usually much more complicated. Here it's dead simple and way more usable than DC++

for those interested, here's the good FOSS client https://nicotine-plus.org/

source (GPL-3):

https://github.com/nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus

It's still chugging along in that some client software is still maintained, but the userbase has dwindled. I recently fired up Soulseek for the first time in over a decade, and I was unable to find some indie stuff that was commonly shared back in 2010 or so.