I'm pretty pessimistic about Tor and if I were to run a bridge or relay I definitely wouldn't run it locally. If you're going to run one, you might as well host it remotely so that there are extra steps in a state figuring out that you are trafficking other people's data. By design, governments can figure out that you're using Tor and what your "role" is, which is bad for both the users and those hosting bridges.

What we should be doing is encouraging people to use I2P and making it as accessible to the public as Tor (and even more so).

Why I2P over Tor?

- All nodes have the same role, so there's no distinction between nodes in terms of whether they are an entrance relay or any other user.

- It's not designed to be a clearnet proxy, thus there are no "exit" nodes although hidden sites (aka eepsites) can of course be made to forward requests to the clearnet.

- I2P has a sort of DNS system built-in that Tor lacks.

- A totally separate or private P2P network is much easier to form with I2P than Tor.

- Hidden sites are faster on I2P than on Tor.

- I2P didn't come out of DARPA.

- Torrents that are totally internal to the network and don't rely on clearnet trackers or DHT.

Above all, if you have this concept of an "exit" node then it's feasible to observe exit nodes and correlate traffic to a clearnet destination with individual users. Depending on the regime a person is subject to, their use of Tor can potentially backfire on them because the flawed network design.

The concept behind Snowflake seems really cool, and maybe it works out for a lot of people in the short term. It is, however, potentially adding vulnerability to the network by virtue of adding another layer of complexity. Any time you add complexity to a system, you are creating potential for something to go wrong. With Snowflake you are, again, asking for people to identify themselves as Tor bridges (effectively) and neither the Snowflake bridge or the client are benefiting from a darknet connection when talking to each other because they're using WebRTC. WebRTC can of course be used to leak IP addresses.

However, I cannot seem to find the source for the Snowflake browser extension anywhere. This is concerning in and of itself. Does anyone know where it's located? The page for it on addons.mozilla.org does not link to a repo, and the Gitlab repo for Snowflake doesn't appear to include any code for packaging a browser extension. I would not install a browser extension that doesn't have an available source no matter who it's coming from.

If we want censorship-free communication that's as anonymous as can be, then give up on a formalized way of accessing the clearnet and prefer internal networking rather than running glorified VPN proxies.

Tor sucks all the oxygen out of the room while having not adequately addressed the serious flaws in its design.

Although I know there are reasons why people would be interested in running at Tor bridge and using Tor right in this moment, in the long term, we'd be of better help to the world if we worked on bettering and promoting a network project that is overall better for the censored user in the long term. People should be as aware of I2P as Tor and it should be extremely easy to use it. We should also make sure there's plenty of good content available on the I2P network (yes, I am gradually working on this).

I2P implementations:

- https://github.com/i2p/i2p.i2p (the official Java based implementation)

- https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd (a C++ implementation that is also used to make I2P available on Android)