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by superkuh 169 days ago
>It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.

You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.

The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.

As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.
2 comments
flipped 169 days ago
They don't own the network. The people who run the relays do. v2 wasn't shutdown in an instant. It was necessary and you could have just redirected your users to v3 and tell them to use it instead but you had to whine about your short-commings on Tor?

It's not only for high-security. It's for the state-of-the-art anonymity.

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superkuh 168 days ago
All the links between .onion sites broke when the relay and other infrastructure operators started running the broken (no Torv2 support) releases the Tor Project put out. All the writings of sites about each other. Everything that made it a web.

It doesn't matter that it was technical possible to try to manually reach out to random visitors of my sites and try to tell them that the entire domain name was changing. That didn't fix the web or links aspect at all.

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mantisV3 169 days ago
They didn't provide any migration path from v2 to v3?
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sanskritical 169 days ago
They did not. And many apps (Ricochet Messenger comes to mind) were not visited by a web browser. So it isn't like you could announce an HTTP 302 and just seamlessly transition.
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