Chapter 1 of 6 / nothing loads
One address opens and the others will not
People report this as a fault. It is closer to the opposite, and the pattern itself carries information that a single working address would not give you.
Why several addresses exist at all
Hidden services are slow to reach and easy to overload. Running the same market on more than one address spreads the load, keeps something reachable while one has a bad day, and lets an address be retired without taking everything down at once.
They are not copies of each other in any meaningful sense. They are doors into the same building, and doors get stuck independently.
What the pattern tells you
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| One opens, two hang | The two are busy or retired. Nothing is wrong with you | Use the one that works |
| All three hang | Your route or a real outage | Rebuild the circuit, then wait |
| One opens and looks different from the others | Worth stopping over. See chapter two | Check a signature before typing anything |
| A fourth address you found opens fastest | The least reassuring outcome on this page | Do not log in. See below |
Fast is a weak signal in the wrong direction
A copied site carries no traffic and runs no defences, so it frequently feels quicker than the real one. Arriving during a slow stretch and finding something snappy is not the relief it seems, and it is the moment worth being most careful.
When the pattern does mean something
- An address that used to be in the set and is not any more. That is retirement, and it does not reverse. See the next page.
- An address that is in the set but has been dead for weeks. Lists go stale. Compare against a second source.
- All three dead for several days while other onion services are fine. That is a real outage rather than your setup. There is still nothing to do about it.
What to do with the working one
Use it, and check a signature before you type anything into it. Reaching an address that opens tells you a door opened. It does not tell you whose building it is, and that question has exactly one honest answer, which is a signed statement checked against a fingerprint you already hold.
Which one to settle on
Whichever one opens. There is no best address in a published set and nothing outside the market can rank them, so preferring one because it feels faster is fine as a convenience and means nothing as a judgement. What matters is that it is in your saved set, and that you check a signature before typing anything into it.
- Do not settle permanently on one. Sets change and an address you have used for a year can be retired next week.
- Do not conclude a slow one is fake. Load is not a signal about authenticity in either direction.
- Do keep all of them. The whole point of having several is that they fail independently.