I've made torrents and then seeded them to my friends without either of us setting up port forwarding. All I did was give them the torrent file and then it worked.

Maybe there's something going on under the hood that makes my situation unique. My experience though is that I didn't have to do anything related to port forwarding when sharing a torrent.

However, port forwarding is required for something like Soulseek. I'm not sure why it would be required for one and not the other.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 9 points 2 days ago

Probably the port forwarding was automatically set up by UPnP, which is also something that can't be done on a vpn without port forwarding. If you have a tracker, the torrent might also work, but then the tracker itself would have to be port forwarded.

[–] SincerityIsCool@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Were you using a VPN at the time? I was under the impression that the issue is at standard anything involving ports just doesn't work with a VPN because it would be trying to get to the port on the VPN, which the VPN would rightly refuse unless you'd set it up to forward that port

[–] propitiouspanda@lemmy.cafe 1 points 2 days ago

Yes, I was using a VPN. It's still working right now.

black0ut may be on to something, but I don't know much about trackers. I think creating torrents with qbittorrent automatically includes 'opentracker' but I don't really know what that means.