Most of you will say that the succesor to eMule is BitTorrent as it is the most widely used P2P network today, but there are some things that BitTorrent lacks and eMule provides. The most notorious for me are the following:
- Built-in network-wide search
- Easy sharing
- Unique links
Maybe you don’t consider this features important, but the fact is that with the approach BitTorrent takes, we are highly dependent on central points that make the network vulnerable. With BitTorrent we depend on trackers and link listing websites to share content. A torrent client is useless on its own if we don’t have a link listing site to get torrents or magnet-links from. On the other side, with the built-in search eMule provides, one can start downloading without the need for a website to take links from.
Easy sharing is also very important, because it provides more peers to download files from. This is specially important on rare files, because with torrents the seeds to download a file can become scattered between different torrents and there can be 5 different torrents seeding the same data, yet they don’t share peers. It is clear that one torrent with multiple seeds is preferred that multiple torrents with one seed each, for example.
When there is one single way to identify a file on the network (like with ed2k hashlinks) even the less tech-savvy users are able to contribute. Sharing on eMule is as simple as dropping the file you want to share on your incoming folder (even if it is not the optimal way to do it). In BitTorrent, you must download an existing torrent file or magnet link, stop the download, replace the half downloaded files with the ones you already had downloaded, making sure that you use the same directory structure and filenames that are defined in the torrent, recheck the torrent and start it, all this in order to share files you had downloaded previously. Tell a noob user to do that to help you download some rare file…
And now imagine that you have an entire drive full of sharing material, but the directory structure and filenames differ from the ones used on the torrents (because you like to keep things ordered in your hard drive). This scenario makes it impossible to share those files on the torrent network without creating brand new torrents, so you can’t contribute and be one more seed on already existing torrents.
Why not use eMule then? Because it’s slow, inneficient, and there is practically only one client that is no longer actively developed. Searching for alternatives, the most similar program that has various clients and is multiplatform is Direct Connect, but it is not decentralized, and different servers don’t communicate with each other, so peers for the same file are not shared globally and instead are scattered around different hubs.
Is there really no other program that works the way eMule does? Is there no true spiritual succesor to eMule nowadays?
Qbitorrent uses jacket for in app torrent searching. That file hashing is pretty awesome for emule, never heard of that before
Fopnu seems like the most similar alternative to eMule that is actively maintained. Unlike Soulseek, it can download a file from multiple seeders at the same time. However, the ed2k protocol still has around 100k users compared to barely 500 on Fopnu.
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It’s also direct downloading only from a single peer instead of using a seeder/leecher pool
The way I see it, soulseek is focused on sharing smaller files and niche stuff to a small community. For large files, or things with a large audience, other tools would be better suited.
I use soulseek quite often. It’s a good source of books and pdfs too.
+1
I agree with your criticisms of BitTorrent vs older P2P sharing. The closest successor I know of might be Tribler. I haven’t used it so I don’t know how the uploads are - and it still has many drawbacks/inefficiencies relating to hashing/duplication because it’s torrent-based. But it does contain search, and the ability to share without a website indexing it. It’s kind of like eMule: torrent/tor edition?
It’s still my favorite network (using it from more 20 years ago), but for the latest things I use bittorrent and seed to both networks (bittorrent and ed2k/kad) through mldonkey 24/7.
Well, there’s Gnutella. https://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.io/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-gnutella/ https://www.gnutellaforums.com/
This may be suitable. I’m not sure, I admit that I haven’t used it mucb lately.
I’m still using ed2k/kad network for some things, mainly French Bande Dessinées (BD, comics)
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.
tbh it’s not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:
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No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you’re taking a huge risk.
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Ease of use. It’s a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn’t thrive the way it needs to.
And the advantages aren’t what they once were. There’s so many sites nowadays and it’s so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn’t worth the trade-off.
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IPFS has 2 and 3 (they almost f*ed-up 3 with CID v1 actually)
Can someone eli5 why emule stopped being used, if people liked it so much?
A bunch of eDonkey servers were seized in 2006. This was before the implementation of Kademlia in emule. It highlighted the vulnerable centralized part of the protocol and pushed people to alternatives. Also compared to bittorrent, the lack of moderation and low speed played a role.
Thank you for the in depth explanation
Maybe not an eli5, but lots of reasons.
There’s no stable, consistently updating client that everyone agrees on, the real ‘emule’ client hasn’t been updated in over a decade. Once you get past that hurdle, the setup is also a lot more cumbersome than other file sharing options. The network also has kind of a bad reputation because there’s not a great way to see if you can trust a file until you’re finished downloading it and people definitely do take advantage of that.
