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?

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[–] dan@upvote.au -1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Just because a bunch of posts are misinformed doesn't mean that they're right. There's a lot of misinformation online, especially on Reddit.

Reading either the source code for a Soulseek client, or the unofficial protocol documentation, will help you have a better understanding of how it actually works.

If you look at that document, you will see that there are no server messages related to uploading or downloading files, meaning the server is not involved.

Searches are distributed amongst peers, similar to what DHT does (but it's its own protocol). The server does know about a small number of peers, which then distribute the search to other peers connected to them, etc. in a tree hierarchy: https://nicotine-plus.org/doc/SLSKPROTOCOL.html#distributed-messages

Soulseek's official documentation for v157 (https://www.slsknet.org/157.html) describes it as such:

the soulseek search distribution network is a simple hierarchy where clients are connected to other clients in child/parent relationships. the construction is done dynamically with the server constantly trying to push clients off of itself (only for the purpose of sending search requests) and on to other clients

File transfers are entirely peer to peer. There is no tracker or any other central server involved. The FileTransferInit command (which starts the transfer) goes directly to the other peer that has the file you're requesting: https://nicotine-plus.org/doc/SLSKPROTOCOL.html#file-transfer-init

Getting the list of files a user has is also entirely peer to peer - no central server is involved.