Comment by 🐦 wasolili

Is the motivation mostly to show support for the technology?

Tor's anonymity is improved by more people using it, so part of the motivation behind hosting services is to contribute to the network's anonymity.

but it is slow, it requires that your town or country have an access to tor root servers

@norayr This isn't entirely true. You can use bridges if Tor is blocked in your country, and there are plenty of ways to get bridges without needing any initial access to the Tor network.

slow is also relative. Tor used to be painfully slow a decade ago, but I usually don't notice it anymore. Sometimes you might get a bad circuit but changing that is one or two clicks. For gemini content which is usually small text files, there's no practical impact in my experience

I was served a YouTube video about Tor. From the content, you'd think nothing good happens there. And here I've been visiting BBC web and a few fairly innocuous Gemini capsules.

@bluesman back in the day of v2 onion addresses, it was possible to somewhat infer the popularity of an onion service. From the media reports you'd think elite hacker hitmen drug dealing kidnappers with scary scars on their face (covered by a ski mask at all times) would be the most popular. but it was actually facebook's onion service. I don't remember the exact numbers but I believe Facebook put out a report at some point claiming there was over a million users who used the onion service, and the vast majority of them were just normal users who weren't up to anything nefarious.

it's a bit ironic to use an anonymization network to access social media that requires you to use your real name (though there is some merit to it in some cases), but I do get a laugh knowing that while so-called journalists spread fear about Tor, someone is probably using it right now to like their grandma's vacation photos.

Oct 14 · 2 months ago

1 Later Comment

@wasolili Not to mention there are probably real journalists using it to keep from being jailed or killed.

Original Post

Onion Services — I've been messing with Tor since adding SOCKS5 support to Alhena. I think the whole onion service thing is interesting and was surprised to find a few in Gemini. I set up my own service (temporarily) to see what was involved. I like the idea for running one but I'm wondering why. Is the motivation mostly to show support for the technology?