This exact post first appeared in Reddit 8 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/p2p/comments/4iqwze/where_is_the_true_succesor_to_emule/
There are a lot of interesting comments there as well for those who are interested.
The comment I liked best is:
There isn't one. The purely decentralized model of eMule and gnutella and similar systems has proven to perform poorly compared to the bittorrent/tracker model, for searches in particular. You can almost completely avoid trackers with DHT and magnet links, the tracker pages just "advertise" the torrent.
If you want alternatives, the main one with significant traffic is Freenet. Freenet is really slow and mostly CP (because everyone else is using torrents).
retroshare, which is more for private sharing, has already been mentioned.
My own opinion? Torrents require minimal resources from users other than sharing the specific file. Advertising the file, tracking the file, searching for the file can be passed on resource wise to a trusted person who wants Internet karma. The simple statement: have a ratio of 1.0 can resonate with most 🦍.
Bemoaning the unpopularity of eMule seems to me like another case of programmers ignoring what makes humans tick.
Turns out the powershell step is enough to get 97% of users to shell out cash.
And also, the biggest source of revenue is institutions who either will pay for the enterprise license, or can be sued for a good payday if they try to pirate.