Item — HN Reader

How it works

A URL fragment is the part after #. The HTTP specification prohibits browsers from sending fragments to servers. The server that delivers the page never receives the content, never knows which site you are viewing, and has no way to find out. No content is collected, stored, or logged. The privacy is structural.

A site that was never put on a server can never be taken off one. There is no account to suspend, no host to pressure, no platform that can decide your content should not exist. Each copy of the link is a complete copy of the site data.

Site creators can encrypt the URL itself with a password. Even possessing the link reveals nothing about what is inside.

https://github.com/5t34k/nowhere

5 comments

> The server that delivers the page never receives the content, never knows which site you are viewing, and has no way to find out.

Technically true, practically a lie. Because that server delivers the Javascript which decodes and presents the content, and that Javascript absolutely has the ability to inspect, modify/censor, and leak the content (along with fingerprints of the browser).

> no host to pressure, no platform that can decide your content should not exist.

Except for https://nowhr.xyz, which becomes a single point of failure for all of these sites...

You download the app in case that site goes down.

That's great. Be sure to make these sites into a webring, so that each one can link to the next and thus to all the others.

> A site that was never put on a server can never be taken off one. There is no account to suspend, no host to pressure, no platform that can decide your content should not exist. Each copy of the link is a complete copy of the site data.

Unless that site A is encoded in a format that only one other site B on the internet can decode and "serve" (even if it's all client-side) so whoever wanted to block site A would just block site B as a whole.

> The server that delivers the page never receives the content, never knows which site you are viewing, and has no way to find out.

Let me tell you about a thing called JavaScript.

> A site that was never put on a server can never be taken off one.

If you post a link on HN and the content is embedded in the link itself then HN is the de facto server.

If each copy of the link is a complete copy of the site data, how could a forum work?

> For orders, messages, and real-time coordination, Nowhere uses Nostr relays as communication infrastructure. Relays see only encrypted data they cannot read, arriving from ephemeral keys they cannot trace, sent from a nowhere site they cannot identify.