💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~bh › gemlog › 003_2022-03-21.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 20:46:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)
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The "modern web" is largely centralized. One can attribute this to many factors, economics, politics, psychology, etc. You can find opinions on the news all day. And one of those factors is that running your own web services is complicated. You have to register a domain, get a TLS certificate, and expose your listening socket by port forwarding, or rent a VPS if you don't want to. That's where the web start to get centralized, because owning the data is hard, and people want to put that job in others' hands. They have this "uptime and security as a service" mentality taken from the social construct, your Big Mac is a service, your Starbuck venti is a service.
But what people don't realize is that running your web service is not that hard, with the help of overlay networks like Tor. Perhaps people is confused by the misinformation surrounding Tor, being described as "deep web" (while full of child porn, gore, drugs, illegal shit on Discord and Telegram rooms), bullshit creepypasta stories, and defamation by colleges and the mass media.
However, Tor can totally be used in a useful way. One can self–host their services and edit the `torrc` file to run an onion service, that open connection to the port their services are listening. Simply like that, just 2 seconds from editing that `torrc` file and now you're exposed to the network. Anyone connects to the Tor network that have your onion address can use your service, no domain registration, no TLS certification, no VPS monthly payment, no portforwarding, no NAT hole punching.
And it's superior than networks like IPFS, which can only serve static files and expose your IP. In Tor, the clients connect to real sockets on your machine to use the services, be it webservers and any backends or protocols on top of TCP, and last but not least, conceal your IP behind your onion address.