I don't think is a private tracker per se, or at least most people don't use it like that. As most servers (all I know) and the Kad network is public.

As a protocol is worse in everyway that BitTorrent.

But it has been used for so long that the amount of antique media is amazing. It's my last resort for when I want to find something obscure that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Also sharing is really simple, and the integrated search makes easy to find stuff, rather than navigate a ton of trackers or try to set up embedded search in a BitTorrent client and have it fail half the time.

It also lacks any essential security features, it's just blind trust based in a filename unless you got the e2k link from a forum. So I wouldn't download an executable from there.

Before torrent became viable and after Napster died, emule was the place where to download things.

You'd be really hiped up to watch a movie, you'd find it on emule and start downloading it. You would not shut down the computer for the following two weeks to allow the download to complete, you could indeed stop it and resume later however you were probably downloading at about 5 kb/s a 500 Mb file and would not want to wait months to have it.

You'd then place a dvd in your drive and burn the movie in there. You'd call all your family to finally watch the long awaited movie, place it in your dvd reader and start it.

That's when you'd find out the movie was actually a porn video.

That's how you learn to always check the content before burning it on a dvd.

And yes, a good 20% of movies were actually porn videos for some reason.

aMule is basically the successor to eMule, which is the successor to the freeware eDonkey2000, which by the name you can tell is quite old. Anyways, the main point of eD2K is that it relies on a server that anyone can host using a freeware app called eserver, to which clients connect.

So instead of torrents, which are shared between each peer without a centralizing server, eD2K needs thoose servers.

I could be wrong, but I think eMule came before BitTorrent

For the end user: it's a program with everything included. You don't need to visit any website to find files to download. You can search directly what other people are sharing and download from it.

Now the client evolved since it first appeared but has maintained compability.

Initially you need to connect to a server that would list the files people connected to that server were sharing, then they added a DHT and now you don't need to use those servers. However people still use them mainly because the search is faster.

Please note that sharing is very easy. Just select a folder and you are sharing whatever is in that folder. This creates a lot content to share, but also the quality might not be good. For good quality it's better to have the files curated and for that i recommend to use a community that shares ed2k links (they are like magnet links) for the good and quality stuff (similar to use piratebay vs a private tracker - on pirate bay you might not get the best of whatever you want)