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Tor has a lot going for it. It's where you find the markets (like the old *Silk Road*) and that's attracted a lot of users. It's also a pretty handy proxy if you find yourself in a country where certain websites are blocked.
When most people think of the *dark web*, they're pretty much thinking about Tor (even if they don't know it). Tor isn't the only dark web, but it gets all the attention. Hell, even Facebook is on tor.
Tor gives you encryption and annonymity and it's kind of a neat thing; even if you aren't trying to buy drugs online or something.
Of course, you already know the problem with Tor... it's slow.
Well, of course it is. It does a bunch of fancy routing to anonymize things, and that has a cost.
But you know what? I remember a time when the internet was actually a lot *slower* than tor! Because speed was a big issue back then, it was important that things not be bloated. Webpages tended to be tiny because they had to be. But then we got broadband and CDNs and now the web is as bloated as it can be... 🐷
One solution to Tor's speed issues is to go back to older protocols such as *gopher*, that don't lend themselves to bloat. There's definitely a gopher presence on tor, albeit a tiny one.
Gemini makes several improvements to the gopher protocol (Unicode, for example), but remains similar enough to gopher that several gemini clients (browsers) are fluent in both.
Official Gemini Capsule (as if you haven't been there)
One of the *improvements* that gemini makes is adding TLS. This is kind of a pain in the ass if you're setting up a home server, because (unless I'm mistaken), you need to have a domain name to get this to work; you can't just point people to your IP address. Luckily, there are some free services such as <afraid.org> that'll point a subdomain at your IP address for you.
The benefit is that now we have some encryption instead of sending things in plain text over the clearweb.
You can't opt out of the TLS, so if you put a gemini server on tor, you'll be using TLS where it isn't needed. Tor already encrypts all connections. So yeah, it's kind of werid, but oh well, what are you gonna do?
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-06-09