Lately in the light of more Internet censorship I’ve been trying to establish more reserve channels for communication. As part of it, I am exploring some of the .onion services that are available.
Since at least 2023, there was a discussion of using Lemmy on Tor network. Are there any actual instances or mirrors of instances available through it? Also, is it possible to federate between .onion and clearnet Lemmy instances?
I don’t know how things are right now, but a couple of years ago I researched the topic and read that an instance.onion would have difficulties to properly federate with instances no .onion, which seems logical. It would be necessary to create a parallel lemmy only with .onion
Couldn’t you have an instance that’s accessible on .onion and not on .onion? The same way duckduckgo is accessible through both?
I believe there was some issue with this, at least I get to recall Nutomic discussing it in one of the GitHub issues
Yeah the code only accepts one domain AFAIK that it uses for federation and everything in the UI/API. So even if you could host it at .onion, links, images, in-browser API calls, etc would all serve from the public domain if you wanted federation. The code would need to be written to support alternative domain access with an authoritative domain for federation. In theory you could put some sort of proxy in front that just rewrote everything the server output to replace with .onion and then intercept every request to change the header so the server thought it was coming from the standard TLD, but that’s incredibly fragile and a ton of work.
It will certainly be fun to moderate such an instance, so it doesn’t get de-federated.
This is something I’d love to study more in my free time. Sadly, free time is increasingly hard to come by, so I haven’t gotten past setting up anything beyond onionshare sites.
Same! Hosting and properly managing Lemmy is far beyond my expertise, even without the added layer of onion hosting specifically
I forget but I think someone in the Linux sphere set up lemmy sites as a distinct unit for download on apt or kde or snap or something. Might be worth looking into.
Supposedly once you’re hosting sites it’s easy to set it up as a tor service in some setting or other, but I imagine federation afterward to be a bit of a challenge. It would have to fit the activitypub protocol or whatever it is and I’m not sure how to make that work over such a gap.
Running Lemmy it’s pretty easy. Setup some containers. Unless you plan to open registration but keep the instance only for yourself (like I do), there is really no more maintenance needed.
Probably you don’t even need a server in itself, a PC that stay turned on most of the day will work just fine, data exchange between federated instances will resume then your Lemmy is online
Maybe update the containers periodically and check that disk usage doesn’t grow too much, but that’s up to which and how many communities you subscribe to, since you are the only user of the instance.
With little system administration skills and a habit of getting ahead of myself, I’ve grown to fear containers more than the bare metal lol
But maybe I’ll get to it one day. Still, there’s no use for a single-user Lemmy server on another network if it can’t federate to anything else.
Looking forward to hear more about this, sadly I know nothing myself.
Cloudflare allows onion routing on the free plan so maybe some of the instances protected by CF might have that enabled.
