Personally I love to see someone downloading a shit load of stuff from me. Someone recently got a whole labels releases from me of over 30gb but that just tells me they have good taste in music as far as I'm concerned so I then explored their files and ended up getting a lot of interesting stuff in return.

I think these people with all their locked files asking for shit like gift vouchers in return for the privaledge of downloading a file from them are scummy, so the way you've approached it sounds great to me, you are sharing so grab whatever you need from people. Hopefully they will then explore your files and the cycle repeats!

The fact that you're sharing is already enough

100GB of flacs

You're already doing great.

Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about etiquette beyond making sure to reshare. If people want to to tighten their queue limits, upspeed, etc, they can. Or to your point, if they think you're mooching, they can cancel your downloads.

I just pull no more than an album at a time from people usually. spread it out, come back the next day etc. If you aren't sure, use the chat function and ask them if they are OK with you queuing up more than a couple of full albums at a time.

I share freely, no restrictions other than bandwidth cap and use a round robin to allocate upload slots to people, so if someone does queue up a hundred gigs of flacs from me (in my library that can be a single artist) it doesn't block everyone else for a week.

A few times when I download more than an album from someone,I send them a quick "thanks for the albums!"

Before I download from someone, I always check their user info too

Personally I only ask that you "share-alike" aka make what you download from me available for others to download from you.

If you are sharing a lot of music I really don't mind if you download several albums from me, nowadays with this bandwith I dont care. If you want to be extra polite just a quick "thanks for the music " is perfect. Thanks for sharing your personal rips, that is quality content.

There are some users who are dicks that ban people, but you'll only be banned from that one person's downloads. If it happens just download from someone else who's not a psychopath about it. Most people on soulseek want to share. It's not a private tracker and there's no e-penis to be gained. DO share your own collection though because you might as well.

I suspect a lot of users with silly warnings in their profile like OP described haven't bothered configuring their Upload/Download preferences. The tools for managing slot numbers and queue scheme (round robin v. FIFO) are all there.

I use the leech filter to ensure that whoever downloads from me is at least sharing something. Outside of that I do not care. Download as much from me as you like.

It would be amazing if lidarr could also interface with soulless. Id use it again but I'm way too lazy to go back to running randomly downloaded albums through whatever automated fingerprinting gui that went against musicbrainz I was using at the time

I ban anyone that queues up more than one album and doesn't share or shares only their download folder.