I have ports forwarded locally to deal with my router, that doesn’t apply to my ISP down the line.

So you are under CGNAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

From the wikipedia link:

Carrier-grade NAT usually prevents the ISP customers from using port forwarding, because the network address translation (NAT) is usually implemented by mapping ports of the NAT devices in the network to other ports in the external interface. This is done so the router will be able to map the responses to the correct device; in carrier-grade NAT networks, even though the router at the consumer end might be configured for port forwarding, the “master router” of the ISP, which runs the CGN, will block this port forwarding because the actual port would not be the port configured by the consumer.[7] In order to overcome the former disadvantage, the Port Control Protocol (PCP) has been standardized in the RFC 6887.

You will only be able to upload to someone with a public ip address or with UDP hole punch (but there are some technicalities - and doesn’t work in all the cases). The same will happen if you use torrents. Maybe you don’t notice difference because of the sheer amount of people using seedboxes and vpn.

There are bouncers for that. And better yet there are search engines, so you don’t need to stay all the time so you don’t miss content.

MUD is more like IRC-

MUD is basically a talker with a game.

There’s nothing like IRC+… Maybe, but just maybe, XMPP?

Sorry, i didn’t get the joke.

IRC is nice if there aren’t many people. Otherwise you get stuck in queue for downloading the file. That’s my biggest issue with it. I only use it as last resort.

emule is not slow. It’s really fast (with emule client). You just need to have high id. The lack of clients is an issue and amule although it works is crap (it’s really slow and the dev doesn’t acknowledge that - there’s some problem in the download queues…).

If you don’t want to use emule, use gnutella - namely gtk-gnutella. It supports magnet links (as long as they contain the bitprint hash), integrated search, windows, linux and mac, and it’s fast (since there’s no queue management, it depends on the uploader speed). The only problem is the lack of files being shared.

Or better yet, use shareaza. It supports bittorrent, emule, gnutella, g2 networks. There’s the problem of not being developed anymore (there are some forks, but they are mostly dead) and the bittorrent support is not the most up to date, so some trackers block it.