Snowflake bridge metrics 2023 year in review
forum.torproject.org
This is a summary of usage of the Snowflake pluggable transport in 2023. For the previous year’s summary, see the Snowflake 2022 year in review. The primary Snowflake bridge, called snowflake-01, is supported by donations. In 2023, the Snowflake Daily Operations team paid about €4,820 in hosting expenses to keep the bridge running—with most of that going for bandwidth. In 2024, in addition to paying for bandwidth, we would like to buy new hardware for the bridge, which will enable it to support...

We can also break down users by country. The largest contingent of Snowflake users are in Iran, which has been the case since the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022 1. The graph shows also a large number of users apparently from the United States, but we believe that may be partly the result of geolocation errors, and many of them are actually from Iran. After Iran, the countries with the most Snowflake users are Russia and China.

  • @[email protected]
    2•6 months ago

    Any way to make it work on Android firefox? I have an old android lying around would be nice to make it useful to people in need.

    EDIT:

    Never mind, installed orbot :)

      • @[email protected]
        1•6 months ago

        Didn’t dived to much into Tor, what’s the big difference between a real relay node and a snowflake? If you don’t mind to briefly explain it !

        Haha, yeah I’m aware of exit nodes…

        • @[email protected]
          5•6 months ago

          Haha, yeah I’m aware of exit nodes…

          Dude, don’t even ask, we are people, and we were born to talk and explain, and be curious!

          Snowflake is a bridge, it helps people bypass restrictions applied by their governments/networks

          Relay is a tor node/hop, this is what makes tor possible, be one of the nodes people’s traffic goes through (without allowing them to access the normal internet) Doing this helps decentralization of the tor, and prevents big organizations from pinpointing users

        • @[email protected]English
          3•6 months ago

          Snowflake/bridge is used when you do not want the authorities/ISP know, you are using tor or because it might be blocked (like on contries with censorship). When you are running snowflake/bridge you are helping these users. For the contrary, if you use a normal tor relay, they(ISP, authorities, who ever is watching your connection) know, but they do not know what you are doing.

          • @[email protected]OP
            1•6 months ago

            A proxy is normally only shown if you cannot connect to their entry servers regularly. More apps have this, Signal / Molly, Telegram, …

            So nobody uses a proxy if they dont need to, normally

    • KarnaEnglish
      2•6 months ago

      If installing extension is not an option for you -

      • You can open https://snowflake.torproject.org/ (or https://relay.love/) on a tab,
      • scroll down to ‘Leave this browser tab open or embed a web badge on your website’ section
      • toggle ‘Enabled’ button
      • and leave the browser running.
      • Note: Browser needs to have WebRTC enabled to make it work.

      I’m personally running Snowflake container on docker on my little Raspberry pi 24/7. And, yes, in 2023 most of the connection to my bridge was from Iran.

      • @[email protected]
        2•6 months ago

        Thanks for the tip :) I disable WebRTC by default on my browsers. The Android Orbot app seems to do the trick ! Already helped out 4 people.