I have old software, DVD rips, books which I would like to share with the world,
How do I do it - torrent, InternetArchive

Soulseak, I find it the easiest.
I use an app called Nicotine+

I recently found out that eMule is still alive and kicking.

depends, if it's not "hot" stuff (that copyright owners will search and take down) the internet archive sounds good

torrents are gonna die if nobody seeds, soulseek needs you to be online for someone else to download

I think torrents are the best approach to this thanks to their decentralized nature. they can die if nobody seeds anymore but that doesn't mean uploading it on some site is gonna make it better as that site can go down too. Besides, if you have a spare laptop you can keep always plugged in and doesn't consume a ton, you can make it constantly seed your stuff.

I think personally the best approach is through torrents but that's how I see it. Do what you think works best

Yeah soulseek is great just point it at your folder with the stuff you want to share and its available to anyone searching. Creating torrents is good as well but its messy because there are so many overlapping versions.

Just pointing out that even if OP ends up using torrent or soulseek, it doesn't exclude the possibility of uploading the older stuff to internet archive

You can set up Soulseek on your server

I swapped to slskd from Nicotine+ recently and am pretty happy with it. I don’t usually download from the soulseek network much but I like having my media available for sharing, so I really like slskd’s headless running option. Also it automatically picks up on changes when files are added to or deleted from the shared folders. With N+ I had to set up another container in docker specifically to restart the N+ container on a schedule to trigger a rescan of the shares.

Yes! We need more content on I2P. Also it is free no need for VPN nonsense. Much more anonymus then VPNs as well.

I mainly use it for music. There's a lovely plugin called tubifarry that makes lidarr useful for me. Even works through gluetun with port forwarding!

I get spotty results on soulseek for my music searches because I have a personal preference for .FLAC files which don't seem to be as frequently available (or they're .FLAC files converted from lower quality formats). I use qobuz-dl for my music downloads, which then get shared to soulseek (along with my tv shows, movies, and books), so I guess I'm at least helping to cover the gap I identified for my use-case. Soulseek comes in useful for me when it comes to ebooks, though. I've gotten most of mine off of there, I think.

I have just recently got it set up so I haven't had too much time to use it yet. From a few test searches after that, I was able to pull flac each time as that is my preference as well. I'll keep your suggestion in mind moving forward, thanks!

The last time I experimented with I2P (7 years ago?), you couldn't use the clear web at the same time as I2P. Is that still the case?

Good old eMule.

Never really used Tor, my main experience was with ZeroNet. One reason I went with ZeroNet over I2P was that ZeroNet didn't interefere with the rest of my traffic & still let me use the regular internet whenever I wanted to.

If I understand I2P outproxies correctly, I guess that means I2P still monopolizes your connection and outproxies are a workaround for that, right? An I2P intermediary that passes on normal traffic between you & the rest of the internet?

https://mk16.de/assets/docs/outproxies_in_i2p-english.pdf

Well it is possible with out proxy's in theory. But theirs like only one. Still it is a good thing I2P is focused on just I2P and not mixing the normal web with it.

The easiest way is emule. Just share the folders and that's it. There are other protocols that allow the same, but they have less users than emule users