Tor - The Onion Router

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Why are onion services not widely used? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 months ago by fran@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/tor@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Last time I tried onion it was 5+ years ago and slow as fuck. Has the performance improved?

[–] fran@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bhamlin@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

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.