Looking over these comments, you’d be a fool not to lol

Exactly. Torrenting is just so much more powerful that it’s become synonymous with file sharing as a whole.

FWIW Limewire was not a torrent client, at least not for a long time.

The Napster era of P2P file sharing used centralized servers for indexing and querying the content available: it was a much simpler system than torrents, but much less robust.

So your torrent search site and your torrent client were essentially bundled together within a desktop app. Again simpler: you could just tell someone what program to download and they were off to the races. Great for word of mouth when the web was still underdeveloped.

What came up when you searched was essentially whatever was in the shared folders of whoever happened to be online at the time. So it was even more of a wild west with essentially no moderation.

Overall worse than torrents in almost every way, but it was a fun weird time to be online. I personally went from Napster to KaZaA to Limewire before ultimately moving on to torrents.