New readers take a list of addresses as a sign of duplication or hedging. It is neither.
- What it literally says
- An alternative address for the same thing.
- What it actually means
- A different route to one platform. Your account, balance and orders are identical through all of them, because they were never tied to the route.
- What it does not mean
- Separate markets, separate accounts, or a ranking. Numbering or labelling them would imply a judgement nobody outside can make.
- What to do
- Keep more than one saved. If one is slow or unreachable, switching costs nothing and resolves most of what gets reported as an outage.
- If it looks different
- An address that appears outside the published set, particularly during an outage, is not a mirror. It is a claim.
CommonStandard
Needs actionKeep several
Warning signNew ones during an outage
Why several rather than one
Almost everything that makes an onion unreachable happens along the path rather than at the destination. A lookup that failed, meeting points dropping out, a bad hop in your own circuit, flooding aimed at one address. Those failures are per address, so several make them independent of each other.
| Property | Varies between them? |
|---|---|
| Your account and orders | No. Same platform behind all of them. |
| Whether it is reachable today | Yes. This is the reason the set exists. |
| Speed on a given day | Yes, and it changes hour to hour, so it is not a property of the address. |
| How widely it is published | Yes. Older ones appear in more scraped lists and attract more junk traffic. |
| Whether it is genuine | Not a property of the list at all. See signed roster. |
Why not just oneA single permanent address would be worse, not better. It is a stable target that can be flooded indefinitely, it gets built into every copied page permanently, and it teaches people to stop looking at the string.
What switching does not fix
A genuine platform outage, because a shared backend fails for all of them together, and network conditions, which affect every onion service at once. If unrelated onion services are also failing, no address will help and the answer is to wait.