ED2K - Kad reality check: the estimate is that eD2K/Kad today is a small five-figure-ish concurrent population — call it tens of thousands of active peers globally on a good day, possibly into low hundreds of thousands at absolute most, versus 2–4 million at peak. That's a contraction on the order of 95–99%+. That as an estimate, not a measurement — but the supporting evidence all points the same direction:
* The server backbone, which used to number in the hundreds, is down to roughly a dozen-to-twenty working servers that forum regulars track by hand, with the recurring complaint that pasted lists mostly don't connect anymore.
* A meaningful fraction of what is running are fake/hijacked/honeypot servers — the 2025–2026 guides are mostly malware warnings. In a healthy network, bad actors are noise; here they're a visible share of the population, which is what a thin network looks like.
