It wasn't early; v2 desperately needed to be phased out. The crypto was obsolete and the protocol had known flaws. Over a year's lead time was given (see timeline: https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline/).
However, links live on in a million places, and it's hard to motivate hobbyist webmasters of niche onion sites to migrate. On /r/Tor, we regularly get people asking why some onion site doesn't work, and it's a v2 site. That's two years after they stopped working. (I wish Tor Browser would detect a v2 attempt and give a nice explanation instead of an opaque error message, though)
The truth is that whatever schedule they could choose would cause allegations of it being too early.
Technically there are still plenty of tor v2 infrastructure software running out there. It's only the people using the modern Tor Project releases that cannot visit these sites. The rest of us still can.
I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get to my sites.
But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal was early or not, the switch to secluded, account requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting the bad system doesn't make it better.
haakon|2 years ago
However, links live on in a million places, and it's hard to motivate hobbyist webmasters of niche onion sites to migrate. On /r/Tor, we regularly get people asking why some onion site doesn't work, and it's a v2 site. That's two years after they stopped working. (I wish Tor Browser would detect a v2 attempt and give a nice explanation instead of an opaque error message, though)
The truth is that whatever schedule they could choose would cause allegations of it being too early.
superkuh|2 years ago
I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get to my sites.
But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal was early or not, the switch to secluded, account requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting the bad system doesn't make it better.