# It's never been a better time to dive into Tor - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios
Author: Vane Vander

# It's never been a better time to dive into Tor

published: 2023-07-01

According to WHOIS data from ICANN, I registered `letsdecentralize.org` on October 19 of 2020. Since then, one of the main missions of Let's Decentralize has been to prove to people that the Tor network is useful for far more than just buying drugs and committing crime: anything you can think of doing online that isn't directly commercial, from writing email to hosting websites to checking the news, can nowadays be done over a Tor hidden service. Sometimes you don't even have to move to some obscure service you don't necessarily trust in order to take advantage of Tor's anonymity: over the last few years, lots of mainstream services and organizations like DuckDuckGo, ProtonMail, Reddit, and BBC News have set up their own hidden services to minimize passive data collection and allow uncensored access to those in regions with restricted Internet.

And for sites that refuse to set up their own hidden services, or Twitter who had one but then let it die, privacy-preserving frontends exist, pieces of software one can set up on their own computers or servers and then configure as Tor hidden services to allow themselves or others to access those sites over Tor. These frontends are usually used by replacing the domain of the target service, such as `twitter.com`, with the domain of the frontend, such as `nitter.net`. To avoid having to manually replace the domain in the URL every time you want to, say, access a tweet, you can use an extension such as Redirector to tell your browser to do it automatically each time. That way, you can go directly to an instance like Nitter every time you click on a link to a tweet and never have to talk to the Twitter servers.

Invidious for YouTube, Nitter for Twitter, and Libreddit for Reddit have all existed for a while, but in the few years since I've started Let's Decentralize, there's been a Cambrian explosion of new frontends for different services. For example, did you know that Github has a frontend? And Tumblr as well. I'd bet you'd be happy to know that there's now a way to read Quora answers without having to deal with their annoying login wall. Want to hateread reviews on Goodreads? You can now do that without advertisers knowing. Did a friend recommend a funny TikTok user to you, but you don't want to risk getting sucked into TikTok's provably harmful algorithm? Just fire up ProxiTok in a browser tab, and you get a nice list of that user's videos along with helpful download buttons.

And when someone hosts one of these instances on their server as a Tor hidden service, you can browse the associated service in complete anonymity. Since none of them require you to log in with an actual account, unless you've gone out of your way to break Tor Browser's anti-fingerprinting measures, even if the person running the hidden service is evil, there's nothing to identify you with: you can't exactly geolocate the IP address `127.0.0.1`, which all traffic to a hidden instance comes in as, to anyone's house. The downside to this is that these instances only provide read-only views of the services they proxy. If, for example, you want to post a tweet but don't want to leave the Tor network, you can't do that through Nitter; you'd have to find a way to log into `twitter.com` without tripping their thousands of anti-bot measures or requirement for phone verification. Some Invidious instances allow you to "subscribe" to YouTube channels, but it's not an actual subscription as YouTube understands it; it's just a glorified bookmark of that channel that only lives on that particular Invidious instance. (Unless they changed it from last time I checked. In which case I'd like to know.)

And before I forget, I must mention that the benefits of Tor can extend even past the browser. F-Droid, a FOSS-only app store for Android, has a hidden service you can use to get apps. If you run Debian, you can get software updates over Tor, as well as download whole ISOs for new installations. Whonix and Qubes, two Linux distributions heavily focused on security and privacy, also provide ways to obtain installation files over Tor. I expect more Linux distros to follow suit in the future.

If you're a social recluse like me who doesn't have to worry about posting to social media and your work doesn't take place on your personal computer, for the first time ever that I know of, it's possible to live almost your entire online life over Tor without having to give up "normal people" comforts or become a crazy minimalist. (I say almost because we still don't have the banks on board yet. And I don't recommend trying to buy things over Amazon. Although you can look at item listings...) If we're all waiting for the tsunami tides of totalitarian Internet policies to reach us, then it would be wise to get a leg up and make one's Internet activity as untrackable as possible.

I'll see you on Tor.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander