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I put my blog on the dark web.
Go ahead, visit it: qmhsnaocrhmpngqkqv6qgtpp3svmffegmbxmdyipk6cu64pvpp5urtid.onion (you’ll need Tor Browser to open that link).
It’s the same site you’re reading right now. Same posts, same CSS, same everything. It just lives at a .onion address in addition to imadestuff.com. Let me tell you why.
What the “Dark Web” Actually Is
The “dark web” has the most overblown reputation of any technology since nuclear energy. The media would have you believe it’s a shadow dimension of hitmen and drug markets. In reality, it’s just… a network protocol. A routing layer. A different way for bits to travel between computers.
Here’s the actual architecture:
- The regular web (clearnet) routes traffic through the open internet. Your ISP sees where you go. The server sees where you come from. Every hop in between can observe the connection.
- The Tor network (onion routing) wraps your traffic in layers of encryption and bounces it through multiple volunteer relay nodes before it reaches its destination. No single node knows both who you are and where you’re going.
- A .onion site is a server that’s only reachable through the Tor network. It doesn’t have a regular IP address. The server’s real location is hidden, and the visitor’s identity is hidden. Neither party needs to trust the network in between.
That’s it. That’s the scary “dark web.” It’s encrypted routing. The same math that protects your bank login, applied to the network layer instead of just the transport layer.
Why Would You Put a Blog There?
A few reasons:
1. Because the web should be resilient. DNS can be seized. Domains can be suspended. CloudFront can go down. A .onion address is cryptographically generated from a key pair that I control. No registrar, no ICANN, no single point of failure between my server and your browser. The address IS the public key.
2. Because privacy is a right, not a red flag. Some people browse through Tor because they live in countries that censor the internet. Some are journalists protecting sources. Some are domestic violence survivors hiding their browsing from an abuser. Some just don’t think their ISP needs to know what they read. All of these people should be able to read my blog about cellular automata and breadboard computers without anyone knowing they did.
3. Because it’s punk as fuck. The internet was supposed to be decentralized. It was supposed to be a network of peers, not a hierarchy of platforms. Running a .onion mirror is a small act of defiance against the trend toward centralization. It says: this content exists independent of any corporation’s infrastructure, any government’s DNS, any platform’s terms of service.
How I Did It (The Technical Bit)
The setup is absurdly simple. Here’s the whole stack:
- A $5/month Lightsail instance running Debian
- Tor configured as a hidden service
- Nginx serving static files on localhost
- A cron job that syncs my site from S3 every 5 minutes
The Tor configuration is literally three lines in /etc/tor/torrc:
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/imadestuff_onion/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80
When Tor starts, it generates a keypair and derives the .onion address from the public key. It then advertises the service to the Tor network through “introduction points.” When someone visits the .onion address in Tor Browser, the network sets up a rendezvous circuit between the visitor and my server. Neither party reveals their IP address to the other.
Nginx listens only on 127.0.0.1:80 — it’s not reachable from the public internet at all. The only way in is through Tor. The server’s public IP could be anything; it doesn’t matter and isn’t exposed.
My normal deploy flow pushes the Hugo static site to S3 and invalidates CloudFront. The onion mirror just syncs from that same S3 bucket every few minutes. Same content, different transport.
Is It Dangerous?
No.
Visiting a .onion site is not illegal. Running one is not illegal. Tor Browser is a modified Firefox — it doesn’t install malware, it doesn’t compromise your system, it doesn’t put you on a list.
What’s illegal is illegal activity, regardless of what network you use to do it. Selling drugs is illegal on the clearnet and on Tor. Reading a blog about homemade electronics is legal on both.
The Tor Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Their primary funding comes from the US government (State Department, NSF) because free communication tools help dissidents in authoritarian regimes. The irony is not lost on anyone.
The Punk Part
Here’s what I like about this: my blog now exists in a form that can’t be easily censored, seized, or taken down. Not because I’m doing anything that would attract that kind of attention, but because the principle matters.
The early internet had this energy. You ran a server in your closet, you had a weird domain, you linked to other weird domains, and the whole thing was a strange beautiful decentralized mess of human expression. Then the platforms came and ate everything. Now most of the internet lives on three cloud providers, behind five CDNs, owned by a handful of corporations.
Running a .onion mirror is a small “no” to that. It’s my content, on my keys, reachable through a network designed to resist centralized control. Is it practical? Not really — you get like 10 visitors a month through Tor. Is it necessary? No. But neither is spray-painting a mural on a train car, and that’s still art.
The dark web isn’t dark. It’s just the web, with the lights on differently.
Want to visit? Download Tor Browser and paste this address:
qmhsnaocrhmpngqkqv6qgtpp3svmffegmbxmdyipk6cu64pvpp5urtid.onion