Building an onion service from scratch. Ep. 1 - Introduction - /d/HiddenService

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Post all your i2p, freenet, and darknet links here. A reddit style directory to discuss experiences with certain hidden services.

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Hi all. I often see people comment here with questions about starting a hidden service. I have also been curious, so I am starting on a diy version of a .onion and am looking for people who would be interested in joining.

I am looking into building a from-scratch .onion service and sharing the journey with this subdread so that people to follow can learn something.

To state the obvious, this is not a "for dummies" guide on building dread or silk road. This would just be a how-to guide for building a simple .onion with simple functionality.

My hope would be that through this journey, people can be inspired and want to learn more. The more people who host .onions, the more the community benefits.

Anyway, this is just to gauge the interest from the community. If I get any significant traction, I will continue with this project. Looking forward to all kinds of feedback on this.

To be clear, if it is a harmless site or something like a personal blog that does not break the law in your local country, I do not see any harm in that; I am sure you will pick up a skill or two learning new things and building out new functionalities and getting used to the tor environment that might prove useful to you in the future, BUT (and this is a big BUT), i would strongly advise and caution against going down this dark rabbit hole and venturing into this domain (referencing darknet markets, and hidden services here) without a solid technical foundation and possessing the requisite technical expertise. Such a move is not only incredibly risky and reckless, but it also places your freedom and well-being in jeopardy.

People often observe successful hidden services, marketplaces, forums, and their operators, mistakenly believing that it's a simple endeavor. While it may be achievable, it is far from easy and requires proficiency in numerous areas, not just one. For example, a deep understanding of Tor's mechanics, networking (technically speaking), security, coding, operational security (OPSEC), and many other fields is essential – a mastery that often demands years of dedication.

Take the Dread operators, /u/HugBunter and /u/Paris, or any other administrator for example. I'm sure they would agree and perhaps even chime in to this discussion to support this notion. All it takes is one critical error, one misconfiguration, or one setup failure to trigger a domino effect, resulting in getting hacked or, worse, imprisonment.

If, after reading the above, you remain determined to pursue that path, I recommend starting with a post I stumbled upon, written by Nachash (/post/9169150c446518952691 -- So, you want to be a darknet drug lord...). It offers valuable insight into how you might want to approach the situation, and every single subsection topic in the post is equally as important to understand.

E.D.

Thank you for your post.

Can you recommend a well working hoster for the 'special' content?

don't use tor friendly hosters, most of them work for LE. find common hosting who accepts BTC, and just hide your server activity from hoster, never leave open tor port, hosters don't like it coz their IP will be used by darknet citizens, and not always for something good.

I'd recommend first learn about system administration, and especially network

Thank you for your help.

I hate BTC, because the tx fees are so high and the chain has much load.

I honestly don't dare ask, but what about XMR accepting hosters?

I don't know any, just exchange your xmr to btc and it's safe enough, or maybe eth

OnionShare allows you to host sites.

Great comment. You need to have your OPSEC set up top notch so it takes into consideration you making silly mistakes while tired or just omitting something. You cannot rely on your memory and habit, you need to have good procedures and set up that protects you. Example of this is sabu (lulzec) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Monsegur

One mistake took him down, it was connecting to an IRC server without a VPN which he forgot to turn on, few days later he was busted.

Thank you for mentioning that! Never heard about this.

This is a great idea. I want to follow this

/d/HiddenService

Building an onion service from scratch. Ep. 1 - Introduction

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