Working on completely replacing Spotify completely. Soulseek has popped up a few times here and there among forums and here on lemmy, so I thought I'd give that a go. I've started with getting Nicotine+ client and seems to be working fine. However, what does the traffic look like when downloading/uploading things over the Soulseek network? I read its peer-to-peer network, but does that mean I don't need a VPN? I'm also told to open a port on my router, I'm assuming this is so that I can share my own library with the rest of the network, but how safe is this?
If anyone could help my clarify this I'd greatly appreciate it!
Why do I keep seeing people say port forwarding is required on different topics
Because peer-to-peer connectivity works like that. That's why it's called peer to peer: you connect directly to the other peer, hence you need a port open and you are usually not connected directly to the internet, but through a router/switch/whatever, which in turn should forward the connection on that port to your client app.