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.
You can even do a real relay, not an exit node of course, normal relay should be safe
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…
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
Thanks 👍
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.
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
Source: https://snowflake.torproject.org/