Hi everyone,
In the p2p messaging app we're building, Quiet, users exchange some information
out-of-band (an onion address) and use that to connect to each other over Tor,
as they would for direct messages in Ricochet Refresh or Cwtch.
One UX failure we see now is that newly-online hidden services are not
available when users first try to connect, so connecting after users have just
come online takes unreasonably long (15 minutes or more) and Quiet seems like
it's broken.
Any thoughts on how to speed up connecting to a newly-online hidden service?
One idea we had is to include enough information from the HSDir entry in what
peers exchange out-of-band, so that they wouldn't need to rely on finding the
HSDir entry. (And if this information became out of date, we could simply
encourage users to share information out of band again.) Is there an easy way
for us to get this information from Tor on the receiver side and pass it to Tor
when connecting?
Another idea was to run some service of our own as a fallback, that we knew
would always have the latest HSDir entries posted by our users. Is there some
straightforward way to hardcode our own HSDir so that Tor would always check it
alongside others?
If I'm reading the situation wrong or there's some other possibility I'm not
thinking of, please let me know! We've definitely observed long delays in onion
addresses becoming available, on top of general connection delays, and I'm
trying to find a way to improve this situation.
Thanks!
Holmes
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