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.

  • KarnaEnglish
    2·
    10 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.

    • N0x0n
      2·
      10 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.