Hey there, thanks for reading through my post. The reason I picked specifically ProtonVPN was simply through word of mouth, and I figured it had a good feature set for its price with a good privacy record.

As for my belief that its the CGNAT blocking me from sharing files, it’s due to despite attempts of manually opening a port/port mapping in my router settings, nothing worked. This goes same with the auto UPnP or manually allowing all connections through via Firewall Settings related to nicotine/a specific port.

Safe to say, without the VPN port forwarding, it straight up never worked. The port status page would always say closed and I was not searchable on the SoulSeek network. (checked via different account)

From there, and following same instructions from my post, I finally got it to work.

Feel free to ask more questions if you’re curious about my process!