💾 Archived View for jagtalon.net › why-onion-service.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:28:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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So I recently moved my website from jagtalon.com to this random-looking domain name! So this domain name that ends in a .onion is called an onion service or a hidden service. I moved to it for different reasons:
Onion services make it easy for me to host websites from home because of this feature called "NAT punching". When I first started this wiki, I ran it from my laptop and then I briefly moved it to a 23-year-old iMac G3. Right now it's running on a bog-standard VPS because the iMac is heating up my room, but the point still stands! The ability to host something at home while also not needing to register a domain, get a certificate for the domain, and set up DNS is really nice. Check out the dogcam that I set up using onion services as well!
Running an onion service on an iMac G3
Setting up a DIY doggy cam at home
I love that I don't see the IP addresses of people visiting my website. When I look at httpd's logs, all I see are connections from 127.0.0.1. Here's what it looks like:
onion 127.0.0.1 - - [30/Jul/2023:17:46:17 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2730 onion 127.0.0.1 - - [30/Jul/2023:17:46:18 -0400] "GET /dark.css HTTP/1.1" 200 10674 onion 127.0.0.1 - - [30/Jul/2023:17:46:19 -0400] "GET /me.png HTTP/1.1" 200 66336 onion 127.0.0.1 - - [30/Jul/2023:17:46:22 -0400] "GET /how-irc.html HTTP/1.1" 200 4439
It works the other way around, too. Not only are users anonymous, the website itself is anonymous, too. Imagine wanting to create a website for distributing misoprostol abortion pills or transdermal estrogen, and you wanted to remain as anonymous as possible.
DIY Abortion Pills - Four Thieves Vinegar Collective
DIY Transdermal Estrogen - Boobs Not Bombs
I want to learn more about the Tor ecosystem now that I'm working for the Tor Project. I'm a designer, but I'm still very much interested in the technology behind it. So a big part of what nudged me to experiment and play around with onion services is my day job. (I'm also running a Tor relay)
Running my first Tor Relay on OpenBSD
Since my website isn't visited by most people, I felt ok putting it behind an onion service. It doesn't need to be available to everyone, everywhere. It's a form of self-expression and not for any kind of commercial purpose, so I'm not concerned that it's more difficult to reach. I'm not trying to filter out and add unnecessary hurdles for anyone, of course. It's just fun and intersting to me! I think the Gemini FAQ says it well:
7.10 Why bother at all, it's a waste of time, you'll be lucky if even 1% of the public ever wants to use it.
We would indeed be phenomenally lucky! We do not realistically expect to achieve even 1% adoption. We persevere nevertheless. This really shouldn't be surprising, or confusing, or seem pathetic. "Success at any cost" is a terrible way to run just about any project, but especially one which is supposed to *mean* something. Life is absolutely full of things which some people find useful, or interesting, or rewarding, or uplifting, or just plain fun, which most other people don't see the appeal of. Chances are good that you or somebody you care about really enjoys one or more of these things! Would you tell a birdwatcher they are wasting their time because their neighbours and co-workers are never going to get excited about birds? Would you belittle somebody for writing a pen-and-paper letter to their friend instead of having a video call, just because it makes them both happy?
Because Gemini is still best known and most widely discussed within computer geek circles, chances are excellent that many of the people levelling this criticism at Gemini have at some point in their own past really enjoyed installing an obscure operating system or learning an unusual programming language that the vast majority of their computer using peers wouldn't see the appeal of. Small, opinionated technical projects that go against the grain of mainstream computing are not at all new, or unusual, or bad. Many of them have persisted for decades, perpetuating loyal, enthusiastic userbases despite never becoming household names or making their founders rich and famous.
Normally other geeks feel kind of warm and fuzzy about these projects, especially the ones perceived to be "fighting the good fight", even if they don't actually use them much themselves. Nobody tells the passionate volunteers behind them to give up and stop wasting their time, cut their hair, install Windows and learn how to write scalable, agile Node.js apps for the Real Enterprise World, not in polite company at least. That'd be crass, and would get you downvoted, or whatever, by the wise geeks who know well that computers have utility and value beyond their vulgar commercial applications.
Apparently this well-established norm doesn't apply, though, when the weird, quixotic geeks have sufficiently crazy and outlandish ideas. You know, truly bizarre notions, like that the highly successful five thousand year old technologies of reading and writing actually constitute a minimum viable product in and of themselves; that software monopolies are bad, that surveillance capitalism and attention economics are even worse, and it makes all the sense in the world to just stop using the monopoly technologies that enable them for any tasks which can be successfully completed using technologies that don't, and to build those technologies ourselves; or that internet users should actually have a degree of autonomy in deciding what kind of content they consume, when and how, rather than being forced to just hand totally unfettered access to their eyes and ears over to an unbounded number of unknown-in-advance random third parties every single time they click on a link. Those people clearly ought to be ridiculed.