Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed filesystem, during which time others had existed in the wild for some time.) The "arguable" part is whether you could include eDonkey, GNUnet, and others in that list. What is true AFAIK is that Freenet was the first such system with things like censorship resistance as a primary design goal (though the MojoNation folks might even disagree with that) and a non-trivial user base.
In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.
Napster wasn't decentralized, it relied on a centralized index which is why it was shut down. Gnutella relied on a broadcast search which didn't scale. Freenet's use of small world routing to be both decentralized and scalable was unique, as was it's use of cryptographic contracts (signed subspace keys).
Scalability was limited to global search in around 5 million nodes (with the network spanning 40 million people at its peak), though, due to restrictions in the number of TCP connections Windows (private edition) supported.
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Having been in that space at the time, I think this point is not arguable at all. Freenet was not the first decentralized file sharing system. Freenet might have been the subject of a PhD thesis in 1999, but by the time it became even slightly usable Napster and Gnutella already had substantial user bases. (Similar to Ceph BTW which had a long gap between being a PhD thesis and being an actual usable distributed filesystem, during which time others had existed in the wild for some time.) The "arguable" part is whether you could include eDonkey, GNUnet, and others in that list. What is true AFAIK is that Freenet was the first such system with things like censorship resistance as a primary design goal (though the MojoNation folks might even disagree with that) and a non-trivial user base.
In case anyone doesn't believe me, here's the Freenet thesis which actually mentions both Gnutella and Napster in references. Hard to claim precedence when that's the case.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/615/freenet.pdf
Napster wasn't decentralized, it relied on a centralized index which is why it was shut down. Gnutella relied on a broadcast search which didn't scale. Freenet's use of small world routing to be both decentralized and scalable was unique, as was it's use of cryptographic contracts (signed subspace keys).
That paper isn't the original Freenet paper, it came later. This is the original: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Distributed-Decentra...
Gnutella moved from broadcast to dynamically structured search early on (in version 0.6, 2002). See https://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/src/rfc-0_6-draft.html
Including decentralized download via HTTP using just three added headers and Tiger Tree Hash Exchange: https://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/src/Partial_File_Sharin...
Scalability was limited to global search in around 5 million nodes (with the network spanning 40 million people at its peak), though, due to restrictions in the number of TCP connections Windows (private edition) supported.
Flagged as a (rather obvious) dup account to get around what appears to be a shadowbanned s4n1ty who had just made the exact same comment.
Can't blame somebody for that; shadowbans are repulsive.