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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

It largely consists of a community of people eschewing social media and the big platforms. You'll see it pop up here and there, but a lot of the reason you aren't seeing it a lot is quite intentional. Much of the content isn't even published on the clearnet, instead only accessible over Gopher or Gemini.

It's a hodge-podge of punk, DIY, bohemian, counter-cultural weirdos of every flavor. Poets and unabombers and lovers and shitposters.

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> Much of the content isn't even published on the clearnet, instead only accessible over Gopher or Gemini.

How is gopher or gemini not "clearnet"? Gopher doesn't even have any encryption (gemini uses TLS). Seriously though, i find it weird that everything Google/Facebook doesn't link you to is considered "darknet" nowadays.

Clearnet as opposed to deep web, not dark web.

What difference do you make between those? From my perspective, they're just marketing lingo invented by security vendors, intelligence agencies and cheap journalists.

EDIT: Is my mailbox darkweb or deepweb? What about LAN services? Torrents? Is anything not available on HTTP and public DNS not "clearnet"?

if included in such definitions, your mailbox would be deepweb (if you access it through a standard web browser), since it can't be found just by following links.

> if included in such definitions, your mailbox would be deepweb (if you access it through a standard web browser), since it can't be found just by following links.

A mailing list that didn't have web-accessible archives would qualify. Arguably, so would a list that had archives that just weren't crawlable.

A mailing list that doesn't have web-accessible archives is not *web at all. If the archives are web-accessible but protected/hidden, deepweb.

Sorry, I misspoke. I meant publicly-accessible web archives, vs. ones that are publicly accessible (ie. browsable), but not crawlable (via robots.txt, for example).

Definition is driven by convention, but if it's not trying to show up on Google or the socials, it can be argued it's not on the clearnet.

Isn't this just saying popular things are "clearnet" and not popular things aren't? That doesn't sound right.

Note that I didn't say "if it's not showing up on Google [...]", but "if it's not trying to show up on Google [...]". It's not that it's not popular, it doesn't care about popularity or want to be popular, for one reason or another.

This may seem strange if you come from the commercial web, but on independent web, it's a pretty common sentiment. There is very little benefit to actually getting visitors from the outside if you have no interactivity and no ads. It's not that they attempt to keep visitors away, they just don't do much to bring them in. Blocking commercial web crawlers isn't particularly rare, for example. Some don't support HTTPS, which means you won't get listed on Google.

> It's not that it's not popular, it doesn't care about popularity or want to be popular, for one reason or another.

Right that's what I mean. Is http://danluu.com/ outside of the clearnet?

> This may seem strange if you come from the commercial web, but on independent web, it's a pretty common sentiment.

I've written Gemini software so I don't need the intro. I do get however that "smolweb" people really like talking about their values at the drop of a hat.

If it's intentionally shielded from prying eyes, and possibly nefarious, it's the dark web. More often than not this would be on Tor, I2P, or similar, but that's not required. If it simply can't be easily indexed by search engines, it's the deep web. Overlap between the two is possible.

Your mailbox would be deep web, if it's exposed to the Internet. If your mailbox uses an auto-responder to respond to coded messages with encrypted binaries of an illegal nature, it would be dark web.

This guy summarised the community well. I wouldn't go that far to call them unabombers though. Some of them might have some radical ideas regarding the way software should be written. But that's it.

I did actually find a site that basically boiled down to "Ted Kazinski Was Right And Here Is Why".

But I mean more the whole RMS vibe some people are rocking.

"Proprietary software and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

> I did actually find a site that basically boiled down to "Ted Kazinski Was Right And Here Is Why".

That's not a terribly uncommon sentiment. Usually people mean the manifesto, not the part where he bombed people.

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