Lately I have become more interested in smaller networks and alternatives to the standard world wide web. This website is a part of that journey, joining a tilde pubnix is a great way to join a smaller group of enthusiasts which have no ties to corporate gaols and persuits. There are so many different projects out there, and getting started in any of them can sometimes be a challenge. Hopefully I can provide some tips here to get you pointed in the right direction.
Tor anonymizes your network traffic by acting like a VPN and routing many users’ internet traffic togther to make it more difficult to differentiate individual users. It is also a private network which can be used to access website and other services through .onion addresses which are not available from the normal internet.
SSB is a social platform, but it is not controlled by any one organization. There is no central server and all connections are made directly between devices, in a decentralized network. There is no corporation monitoring your activity or gathering up your personal information.
Beaker browser is software to view other people’s ‘hyper drives’ which they share. These drives are built upon the ‘hyper protocol’ which is a type of database that is replicated with other users, but you control all changes to the drives that you own. All data is shared peer to peer so there is no central server. The protocol can be used for other platforms such as the Cabal private chat system.
Gemini is a new protocol which is a very simple internet request protocol. It is like gopher but adds some modern features like TLS encryption and word wrapping. You will need a specific browser designed to view gemini pages. You don’t need to worry about overly large websites, javascript or tracking with these sites since those things are not even possible with gemini.
Clients I have used: