It amazes me that onion sites aren’t everywhere. They are easy to spin up, you don’t have to pay anything and can run it from your own home. No need to purchase a domain, worry about expiration, have an open port. Built-in DoS protection. Anonymity and authentication by default. No need to configure HTTPS. Sure, uptime is on you and there is some latency/bandwidth limits to be considered, but once you are over that, onions are a solution to many problems and the benefits are enormous.
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Last time I tried onion it was 5+ years ago and slow as fuck. Has the performance improved?
Depends on your location and standards. Lots of the Tor relays are in Europe, so if you are here the connectivity is pretty good. Bandwidth is usually up to 2 MB/s and latency usually goes from 300ms - 1.5 seconds. Initial connections to a server might take longer (5-7 seconds). For browsing the web and playing non-HD videos it’s fine in my opinion.
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Not really, but the performance was based on the nodes you went through. Nodes have gotten better over time, so the experience now should be better.
As someone who just stumbled on here from ALL, I’m vaguely familiar with Onion sites and TOR more generally, but what resources would you recommend to learn more about setting one up for myself to play around with?
It’s easy. Just edit your Tor configuration file (torrc) to enable an onion service. This one forwards from the onion service on port 80 (so users don’t have to specify a port number in the URL) to a local HTTP server running on your machine on port 8000:
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8000Change the directory path based on your operating system. Specify a directory that doesn’t exist yet so Tor can set the correct permissions on it. Next, start or restart Tor. Then just read the onion service’s hostname in the
hostnamefile created in that hidden services directory.You can then run any HTTP server on localhost:8000 and anyone connecting to your onion service can access it. In Python this might be as simple as
python3 -m http.server --bind localhost 8000 --directory .to share the files current directory (but be aware that there are some security considerations, like symbolic links, to be aware of. Just use this for testing.) For production servers you will want a “real” http server.
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Primarily because I can’t use an onion for my email domain so I can’t like have me at znoonkblahblahblah.onion (protonmail)
onion domains indexing is marginal at best, hence yon can’t get good visibility for your onion site.
There are sites like Ahmia that you can submit your site to and which attempts to do indexing. People who run .onion sites should also do webrings like what were popular in the mid-1990’s. I remember seeing those all the time on the original Geocities. Starting a .onion site is easy to do with software like OnionShare.
