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 ex...
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.
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
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.
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.