Are there any .onion instances or mirrors of Lemmy available? (lemmy.today)

submitted 2 months ago by Allero@lemmy.today to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Lately in the light of more Internet censorship I've been trying to establish more reserve channels for communication. As part of it, I am exploring some of the .onion services that are available.

Since at least 2023, there was a discussion of using Lemmy on Tor network. Are there any actual instances or mirrors of instances available through it? Also, is it possible to federate between .onion and clearnet Lemmy instances?

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[-] Foni@piefed.zip 8 points 2 months ago

I don't know how things are right now, but a couple of years ago I researched the topic and read that an instance.onion would have difficulties to properly federate with instances no .onion, which seems logical. It would be necessary to create a parallel lemmy only with .onion

[-] kn33@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Couldn't you have an instance that's accessible on .onion and not on .onion? The same way duckduckgo is accessible through both?

[-] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

I believe there was some issue with this, at least I get to recall Nutomic discussing it in one of the GitHub issues

[-] urushitan@kakera.kintsugi.moe 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah the code only accepts one domain AFAIK that it uses for federation and everything in the UI/API. So even if you could host it at .onion, links, images, in-browser API calls, etc would all serve from the public domain if you wanted federation. The code would need to be written to support alternative domain access with an authoritative domain for federation. In theory you could put some sort of proxy in front that just rewrote everything the server output to replace with .onion and then intercept every request to change the header so the server thought it was coming from the standard TLD, but that's incredibly fragile and a ton of work.

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026

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