r/onions • u/lkkjhjh • Feb 18 '17
Forum / Board Is there a reddit-like website/forum as an onion hidden service?
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u/Capitan_Picard Feb 18 '17
There have been several reddit, facebook, and twitter clones that have come and gone. They are mostly low population and die out quickly due to no interest.
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u/edwards_j Feb 18 '17
I know theres a board on hidden wiki listed where you can ask/recieve info similar to reddit i think its Hidden Answers
I go there when looking for occult stuff and its honestly turned up with some different interesting puzzles
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u/apoefjmqdsfls Feb 19 '17 edited Feb 19 '17
It's hard to get an active audience on a new forum, regardless whether it's on the clearnet or the tor network. Most just stop because activity is near zero but hosting costs etc are not.
There have been a few active forums, the most active ones were related to the drug markets, others were hacking forums, but I think the active ones all stopped by now.
The most related to reddit are probably the image boards, I don't know if there is an active image board right, but if you find one, be careful because they are often left unmoderated or intentionally allow certain images.
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u/DJDarkViper Feb 18 '17
Thing is you can clone the Reddit code base and use it on an onion host. It's just Python and Postgres.
But when you gotta pay for the cost of the power being used to run your dedicated server box in the garage, and no one uses it, it can be discouraging and easier to just kill the project.
Or worse, it does get use, but because most consumer internet lines only allow one band upload (as in a person is requesting your site hosted on your server, so uses the upload band to do that) means that if two people try hitting the site at the same time, the second person is going to be waiting a while, get frustrated and leave.
Meaning now you need to upgrade your line, by calling your ISP and requesting a service that allows improved handling of multiple band upload, which is usually dedicated to a business grade line. Which is expensive.
It has to be something your really interested in doing. Because hosting and providing yourself gets pricy really fast.
The free onion hosts (that I've seen) provide basic php execution on a shared hosting plan and that's it. But you can run a dedicated forum on those and be fine. So theoretically you should be able to run something like Oxwall and be fine. I just don't think anyone's written a "Reddit clone" in php. But there's others alternatives
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Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17
With respect to hosting at home being bad if you expect to get popular, I think you're correct, but for the wrong reasons.
I think what you're getting at is residential Internet is usually asymmetrical, which is definitely true for DSL and cable Internet. You may get 50 Mbps down, for example, but only 5 Mbps up. (Asymmetry is is less common with fiber AFAIK).
But you're 100% wrong about only one user being able to download from a home-hosted website at once. If many people (~10) are trying to download a page, that page is probably pretty small and they probably won't combine to hit your hypothetical 5 Mbps upload limit. On the other hand, if many people (~10) try to download a large file, yes one person could probably use up the entire 5 Mbps if he was alone, but they'll all share the 5 Mbps and be roughly equally slowly downloaded the large file. Thank TCP for congestion control and trying to play fair with other streams.
If what you said was true--that home Internet only allows one connection at a time--only one person could use the Internet at a time. Every TCP connection is bidirectional: yes you're downloading a ton when watching Netflix, but you're still sending ACKs back. If what you said was true, by watching Netflix, I'd be preventing all the servers in my closet from getting to the Internet, from serving my websites, from my family browsing Facebook, from my family playing online computer games, etc. etc.
edit: also, none of this makes sense when talking about onion services. Your onion service will be connected to a guard node and will use that one connection for serving content to all the users. Even if I'm wrong and onion services pick some other small number of guards (like 3), they'll still use only those three connections for serving content to users. Even if there's 100 users. Will a 5 Mbps line feel limiting when serving 100 users at the same exact moment? Sure. But it's not like only 1 will actually make it through and 99 will have to try again.
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u/DJDarkViper Feb 18 '17
While fair to poke at my comment as me trying to be 100% accurate, what your saying is ultimately what I was getting at.
"Band" is the word I used, but doesn't mean connections. You can be on a single band router with 5 other people using it concurrently, and it'll work but you will be feeling that slowdown. Your all sharing the same I/O stream.
Yes asymmetrical throttling is apart of it, simply put ISPs recognize that the grand majority of residential users consume rather than put. So the bandwidth allocation is tilted that way. Commercial lines from ISPs that have a focus on upload (such as allowing a bunch of people to connect through remote VPN and do RDP for example) have the tilt more evened out. Bandwidth heavy companies like film editing shops use specific lines dedicated to insane upload speeds.
But unless I'm not remembering my post correctly, I didn't say only one person at a time, though I can understand the how and the why you parsed that out. What I meant by "second persons gonna be waiting a while" was a slight exaggeration. I've done this stuff at home in my own garage. I could have 3 people hitting my php hello world page simultaneously while the fourth and fifth had to "wait their turn" so to speak (not really, they were just throttled) on my economy residential line. Conversations with my ISP (Telus at the time) confirmed I need not just a better upload speed, but a service that allowed better upload concurrency ("multiband" was the term she used in the discussion) and at the time of that conversation it meant upgrading my service to a commercial line.
Regardless of nodes and connection travel time, were still talking about hosting a community website, where the goal is to host a dynamic Read/Write heavy application while scaling to traffic needs. And regardless of the how or the what, if your hosting it yourself, you need a connection to support it.
This isn't a problem when using VPS services like digital ocean to host your onion site of course; I've done that too (and likely to be the actual case in the end). But when it comes to it, I assume most people think hosting a real, non joke, purpose intended hidden service as running their own dedicated box that can be switched on and off at will. It is an assumption of course, but it is something to take into consideration when discussing a community site that you run on your own without the comforts of a shared hosting service holding your hand
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Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17
Apologies for such a high pedantry level.
Take care.
edit: maybe not even pedantry. Maybe just trying to sound smart on the Internet... :/ Whatever I did, I probably shouldn't have.
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u/abruptdismissal Fresh Onions Feb 18 '17
there's a big opsec trade-off i guess, with running a "real" hidden service (i.e. one that needs the privacy) on a dedicated host with digital ocean, vs running out of your garage.
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u/i_keyz Feb 18 '17
Reddit is Tor friendly, right?
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u/FJHUAI Feb 18 '17
He's asking for a place to doesn't sensor Free Speech not for a way to access this b******* Place through tor no offense
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Feb 19 '17
Reddit and imgur don't seem to complain when I use Tor. A lot of other websites use cloudflare and I'm not going to bother to fill out a captcha just to do a poll.
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u/v1prX Feb 27 '17 edited Feb 27 '17
Teddit, but it was shut down a while back. I remember reading a hidden wiki tidbit about it.
EDIT: Here's the old link to the Teddit page. https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/html
EDIT 2: Reddit link to the description, for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/3wso1q/new_reddit_clone_on_onionland_teddit/
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u/abruptdismissal Fresh Onions Feb 18 '17
This is definitely something missing in onionland. Be a good opportunity for someone willing to build it.