I'm only really familiar with RED (I know there are others) but it didn't bounce back even close to What, unfortunately. Perhaps others did significantly better, but I think without a dump of the catalog, it's going to be next to impossible to ever get back everything that What had.
Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.
RED does not have the amount of users that What had, but it vastly surpasses the amount of flacs it had on the day it went down: 864k 'perfect' flacs vs 1,360k on RED currently.
Would you mind sharing any names? I don’t mind whatever ratio limits exist for new accounts, but I deeply miss finding music through staff picks and the forums
orpheus and redacted are the big ones. Getting in, of course, will be a challenge.
rutracker is a pretty open alternative.
Having experience with these platforms, they wane in comparison to the gem that What was. It wasn't just a repository / archive, it was also a thriving community.
However, we need to move on. These are currently probably the best alternatives, so thank you for pointing these out. It's just What was too damned good.
Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees