The word mirror is being used to mean two different things on Nexus

The word "mirror" used to mean an operator-run duplicate of the same market. It is quietly starting to mean any address that is not the first one the reader saw, including addresses that are not the market at all.

How it read before

A mirror was a straightforward idea. The market ran the main onion. If that onion was under load, or unreachable to some readers, the market published one or more additional onions that served the same accounts, the same wallet, the same listings, the same messages. A reader logging into a mirror saw the same balance. A vendor with orders on the main onion saw them on the mirror. The word "mirror" carried that meaning cleanly. It was operator-run and it was the same market.

The opposite of a mirror was a fake. A fake was a lookalike onion, sometimes visually identical, that captured credentials or deposits. Fakes were not mirrors. Nobody who spoke carefully mixed the two words up.

How it reads now

The drift matters because a real mirror and a fake are not the same object. A real mirror shows the same account and the same funds; using it feels like using the market. A fake shows a copy of the login page and swallows what is typed into it. Calling both of them "mirrors" removes the word we had for telling them apart.

In practice this means the word "mirror" no longer tells you anything on its own. It used to be a label for a specific and useful category. Now, when someone in a chat says "I found a mirror", the sensible next question is "what do you mean by that". If they mean an operator-run alternate, you want to know how they verified it. If they mean an unfamiliar address they found in a search result, you want to know why they trust it. The two answers are very different, and the same word is now covering both.

Why this probably shifted

Two forces are working in the same direction. The first is that fake addresses have got better at looking like the market. When a fake is convincing enough to feel like a working page, calling it a fake sounds like a technical distinction to a new reader; calling it a mirror sounds descriptive. So the same word starts covering both.

The second is that operator-run alternate addresses now show up in more places than before. Directories publish them. Forum posts pass them around. Readers who never learned the underlying distinction just call the alternate "a mirror" because that is what the directory called it. Once the word covers every alternate, it covers the malicious ones too.

What to change on your side

Keep two words in your head and use them on purpose.

• A mirror is an operator-run alternate. It exposes the same account and the same balance. The only place to source it is a reference you already trust, such as the addresses page, and the operator will normally have signed it. When in doubt, log in on the main first and see whether the alternate shows the same wallet.
• A fake is any other address that dresses up as the market. It is a scam page. It is not a mirror. It is worth naming it "fake" out loud, because the label is the warning.
• When another reader passes you "a mirror", ask two things before you touch it: where they sourced it, and whether the operator signed it. If the answer to either is "I do not know", do not visit.
• If you ended up on a duplicate-looking page and the checkout address confirmation or PGP-signed invoice blocks are absent when they used to be present, close it. A real alternate carries the same signals as the main.

What this entry is not claiming

The entry is not claiming that any specific directory is misusing the word deliberately. Most drift like this happens in conversation, not by design. It is also not claiming any of the three onions at the top of this page is or is not a mirror; the reference page carries that. The observation is only that one word is now covering two very different objects, and the reader who slips between them loses the ability to warn a friend.