It followed in the footsteps of Napster and limewire as a P2P client, primarily for sharing music. Unlike its predecessors, it survived basically unchanged for the last decades, basically just flying under the radar.

I still recommend it, though I think Nicotine+ is a better client (its a different frontend for the same network). It's not necessarily better than torrenting, just different. It also has chatrooms which I used to quite enjoy as a youngster back in the early 2000s.

it's kind of like torrenting but there's a search engine, individual transactions are one-to-one, you can browse all the files a user shares, and I don't think ISPs know about it.

It's an old P2P app focused on music, it's been like 20 years since I last used it but at the time you could find pretty much anything no matter how obscure.

You used to be able to find just about any music on soulseek. I used to use it a lot 20 years ago, I assume from the name popping to still that you still can.

Just wondering, other than the obvious free tier audio quality (high is server side) what is the general consensus on using a modded client for premium features? I just don't have the option of network related stuff like torrenting or direct download + self hosting, as in my current situation I'm not my own admin. It's worked pretty well in my experience though I plan on subscribing to tidal soon for higher audio quality. Modded clients also seem more ethical to me as usage still count towards an artist's stream count (and thus paycheck, popularity, etc). It feels good as I ended up being a top listener for a newer artist I like as she was coming to popularity, and my streams + sharing spotify links to friends contributed a lot to their growth.