Nobody on this side decides what the set contains

Two different things get called the list

There is the set of addresses a market has arranged and considers current. Then there is the set of addresses that appears on some page. Those are different objects and only one of them has any authority.

The first is a decision. The second is a report of a decision, made by somebody who was not in the room, at some earlier point, using whatever they had.

What that makes this site

A report. The three strings above were supplied to this site and are printed unchanged, in the arrangement they arrived in, with nothing added and nothing marked as principal. This reference did not choose them, cannot alter them meaningfully, and would not know if the underlying decision changed.

Saying so is not modesty. It is the fact that determines what every page here can honestly claim, and it is why the method page exists.

Why there is no channel for the announcement

When the set changes, the change happens at the source and there is no reliable way for it to travel. A retired onion address does not forward anywhere. There is no redirect from a dead onion service, because that is not a thing that can exist. It simply stops answering.

So every downstream page finds out late, if at all, and a page that has not been touched in a long time is indistinguishable from one that has been checked and found correct. That is the whole problem of the lists section.

The asymmetry this creates

The market

Knows the set. Can change it at any time. Owes no announcement to anyone and has no safe way of making one.

A publisher

Holds a copy of what it was given. Cannot verify authorship of a string by looking at it. Can only ever be as current as its source was.

A reader

Holds a copy of a copy. Has the least information of the three and is the one who has to act on it.

What a reader should take from the asymmetry

Prefer sources that say where their strings came from over sources that say how good their strings are. The first is a checkable claim about provenance. The second is a claim nobody can support.

Treat agreement between independent sources as mildly reassuring and disagreement as uninformative rather than damning, for the reasons set out in two honest lists.

Expect to be behind. Being behind is the normal condition of everybody downstream, including this site.

Why plurality makes authorship visible

With one address the authorship question is invisible. There is one string, everybody has the same one, and the only question is whether a given copy is accurate.

With three, the question of which three becomes live. Two sources can differ in membership rather than in accuracy, and the reader is suddenly in the position of having to think about where a set came from rather than merely whether it was typed correctly.

The question this makes worth asking of any source

Not whether a page is trustworthy, which nobody can settle, but what position it is in. Did it receive the strings, copy them from somewhere, or assemble them from several places. Each of those produces a different kind of error and a different kind of reliability.

A page that says which of the three it did is telling you something checkable about itself. A page that does not is asking to be evaluated on tone, and tone is the one thing anybody can produce.

What this study is not. It is not a claim about who runs the market or how decisions are made there, which this site has no view on.