Gemini + Tor Mashup Project

I've been suffering from a lack of fun technical projects in my life lately. I want a side project that is useful and interesting, but I was lacking any decent ideas.

That is, until today...

I have long been a fan of Tor. I love computer security and privacy and Tor is just a phenomenal project. Tor hidden services are just awesome for so many reasons.

I've recently discovered (and fallen head of heals for) Gemini. I love the simplicity and the community around it.

I wrote earlier about my interest in combining Gemini and Tor. It seems like Gemini deployed as a Tor hidden service is an excellent option for anonymously sharing content. It's safer for the clients because the protocol makes leaking user data very difficult (unlike HTTP where you have to try hard to avoid leaking data). It's safer for the server because the simplicity leaves a much smaller attack surface. I love the idea so much I wrote about it.

My gemlog on "Hidden Gemini Capsules"

Full blog post on Gemini and Gemini Hidden Capsules

I've also recently learned GoLang and am lusting for some sort of project using that language.

Anyways. Today I discovered a GoLang library that makes it easy to launch a hidden service in GoLang and it is completely self-contained / statically linked.

https://github.com/ipsn/go-libtor

So my idea/project is to smash this library and a bare bones Gemini server together into a single tool. This would then make it super quick to deploy a hidden service from a folder full of GemText.

It could be deployed as a single executable and would handle building the hidden service, building the required self-signed certificate, and hosting the content anonymously over the Tor network.

I don't think I'd recommend that activitists and people whose lives may be at risk host their content using my software, but I think this would provide a pretty nifty solution for normal people who want to anonymously self-host a Gemlog without being beholden to various Tilde communities or VPS providers to keep your identity private.

So... That's the plan.

I'm looking forward to starting on this and having some fun. I'm not sure if I'll write my own Gemini server, or try and build upon one that is already written. At the moment, I think I'd lean towards writing my own just to keep it as simple as humanly possible.

Cheers!

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