Whose fault is it, actually

Something went wrong and the first thing anybody does is decide who did it. That decision gets made fast, on almost no information, and it is wrong most of the time.

This site sorts Mars market failures by the party actually responsible rather than by what the symptom looks like. There are five of them. You, the market, the vendor, the network, and nobody at all. Every case names one, explains who normally gets blamed instead, and says what changes when the attribution is right.

The five actors

• You the largest section, and the least popular one
• The market rules, addresses, moderation, the wall at the door
• The vendor dispatch, description, silence, packing
• The network Tor itself, relays, routing, load
• Nobody the small honest residue, kept small on purpose

The finding, stated up front

Two patterns run through everything here and both are uncomfortable.

The first is that most things blamed on the market are the network or the reader. A page that will not open, an address that stopped working, a session that died halfway through. These get filed as market problems because the market is what you were trying to reach, and the routing that failed is invisible.

The second is that most things blamed on bad luck are the reader too. Bad luck is the explanation that requires nothing of anybody. It gets reached for whenever the alternative would mean changing a habit, which is why the section for it here is the smallest one on the site.

Why bother sorting them

Because the attribution decides what you do next, and the wrong one sends you in the wrong direction at the exact moment it is expensive to go there.

• Blame the market for a bad route and you go hunting for a replacement address, which is the riskiest thing in this whole subject.
• Blame the post for something never sent and you wait through the dispute window until it closes.
• Blame the vendor for a market rule and you burn a relationship over a decision they had no part in.
• Blame bad luck for your own habit and the habit stays exactly where it is.

None of these are opinions about character. They are about where the next hour of your attention goes.

How to use this

If something is happening right now, go to the case table and find the shape of it. If you want the reasoning first, the rule is one page and covers how an actor gets assigned.

If you came for a mars market link, the addresses are above and also on the address page. Nothing else on this site will help with that, and this site cannot tell you whether any of them works.

What this is not

Not a status page. Nothing here is checked, timed, pinged or monitored, and there is no last checked date anywhere because no checking happens.

Not advice about whether to use any of this. Not a review. No advertising and no arrangements with anybody. Where a page states a judgement rather than a fact, it says so in the sentence.

Asked often enough to answer

Does this site know if a mars market mirror is working?

No. It publishes addresses it was given and checks nothing. Any page claiming to know whether an onion address is up right now is describing a moment that has already passed, from a vantage point that is not yours.

Why is the section about the reader the biggest one?

Because that is where the cases land once they are sorted honestly. It is not a moral position. It is what happens when you stop assigning failures to whichever party was most visible.

Are these the official addresses?

They are published addresses, listed here as supplied. This site makes no claim about them being official, current or safe, and it has no way to establish any of those things.