I write anywhere. Like right now, sitting outside at night with a campfire going. I wish I could share a picture of it… but my whole thing about not posting anything that could expose my identity won’t allow it. Not that my opsec is running at some super high threat level or anything. Just because I hang around darkweb forums doesn’t make me a criminal. I just want to keep my pseudonymous identity intact as a habit.
About a day ago I deleted a bunch of old posts. This blog actually started in 2024, when I randomly wrote something about why I kept using Tor for years. It ran on PHP back then, then Hugo, then Axum + Askama once I decided to open it up to the clearnet. The reason I started it in the first place, besides some of my other services being tor-only, was that I was just fed up. Fed up with heavy JS pages, fed up with pagination just to read a single article, bloated ads everywhere with popups on top, login walls, being forced to enable JS just so they can track me. Fuck no. Around that same time I stumbled onto this hidden gem blog on Tor, no JS, minimal, zero trackers. That got me wanting to start my own. But you know what happened? That blog died, went completely unmaintained (don’t do this, abandoning software you run is genuinely bad practice), and I only really started writing actively in 2025.
Why did I delete the old posts? They read more like microblogging. And honestly some of them I wrote like a person just unhinged, cursing and rambling with no real point (lol). Since I’m actually writing properly now, I figured I’d just retell it all here, which is what this post is.
Like I mentioned, this blog started on Tor, then I2P, then clearnet. I only bought a TLD domain (a cheap one) around January for the clearnet version. Partly because it didn’t seem like a bad idea to expose some of my homelab services without having to tunnel everything through Tailscale.
At first I locked down certain features. Comments were tor/i2p only. The contact page was blocked on clearnet. Notes (before it became a feed pulled from my Mastodon, it used to be short casual entries, kind of like microblogging). I hid the contact page too because I hate clearnet scrapers way more than I do the ones on Tor. Back then you’d notice a lot of differences if you compared the hidden service version with the clearnet version of this blog.
I’ve always built with Tor’s “safest mode” in mind. The blog has run without JS from day one. I was still using cookies for a while before I eventually built Gaunter. Gaunter let me drop cookies at that point, though not fully since comments still needed them. I was also paranoid about DDoS and annoying scanner bots, which is a real concern on hidden services since you can’t just freely block IPs. But since I wanted the blog to actually meet my own standards, I ended up pulling the comments feature entirely. Now with a smaller attack surface, the blog is clean. No cookies, no JS. And because my HTML is semantic, it works fine in Lynx or w3m too.
I also tried removing my 88x31 buttons the other day just to see if I could get the homepage under 10kb. Technically yeah I could, but it felt forced and weirdly empty. So I put them back, haha. Optimizing for lightweight loading has kind of become second nature to me because on Tor, this stuff genuinely matters. Ever wonder how devs over there handle icons? Sprites. I’ve picked up some legitimately clever CSS tricks and web optimization ideas from that corner of the internet. On Tor, custom fonts and SVGs are basically dead on arrival, and no JS isn’t a preference, it’s a hard requirement.
On top of that, I’ve written a few opinion pieces about the “darkweb”, or more accurately, hidden services. Eepsites if we’re talking I2P. Remember how much noise there was around Tor back during the Silk Road era? Or all those creepy and disturbing videos that supposedly came from the darkweb? Or that rumor going around that just opening Tor would get you raided by the FBI? That kind of nonsense is exactly what locked people into thinking Tor is just a place for bad things. Which isn’t entirely wrong, but the whole point of Tor is anonymity. The sad part is people would rather eat up that sensationalist garbage than actually care about privacy as a right.
So that covers what those deleted posts were about. The whole picture, squeezed into a few paragraphs.
And honestly, this is the nice part about controlling your own data and having full ownership over it. That kind of freedom is enough for me. Because if I keep pushing further down that road, I’d probably just end up living out here with no internet at all. Just me and all this.