I am sharing about 25 albums on soulseek but my uploads are empty which as far as I know means nobody has tried to download anything from me. I don’t have port-forwarding available to me, I use a VPN, and I am periodically offline. Is it really weird that nobody has downloaded anything from me or is that kind of normal?

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    You need to have port forwarding enabled to upload. Get a better VPN that allows port forwarding :) AirVPN is usually the recommended VPN to use with Soulseek.

    Either that or pay for a seedbox (a remotely hosted server than you can run P2P file sharing apps on) and run Soulseek on it.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        How is the downloader going to ask the uploader for the file without an open port?

        Edit: I read the protocol documentation and discovered that it does have a way to make the connections the other way, so only one side needs to have port forwarding enabled.

          • dan@upvote.auEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Soulseek is a totally different protocol to torrents. It doesn’t use a tracker. Files are per-user. When you download a particular file, it only comes from one user. It’s like how Limewire and KaZaA used to work (since it’s from that same era)

              • dan@upvote.auEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                There’s no tracker. Your link just says that there’s a central search and chat room server. The search just points your client to users that have files with that name. It doesn’t track anything else.

                The server does not know which files you download - that’s just between you and the person you’re downloading from. You can download files directly from a user (e.g. by searching for a username then browsing their files) without relying on the central server at all.

                You don’t need port forwarding for downloads, only for uploads.