Guard nodes vs public bridges

[boldsuck]

@jonah

My theory is that there are in fact some relay operators (e.g. Emerald Onion) who are more trustworthy than others, perhaps because they operate more transparently, or for some other reason you can judge them by yourself.

I think if that’s true, then it follows that you should intentionally force your guard node to be one which is run by one of those operators you consider trustworthy, to further avoid profiling & minimize the threat of an attacker-controlled guard.

Yes, your thoughts are correct. I do that too. Including the use of my own Guards & Bridges.
If you use vanilla bridge lines, not obsf4, then these bridges are just like guard nodes.
Trusted vanilla bridges or trusted Guards in EntryNodes are the same in your Tor circuit.

@jonah

So I’m asking whether that’s a valid use-case for bridges being published on a website like in the example I gave above, or if public bridges just don’t make sense at all.

No. Emerald was a special case because they had problems with their exits.¹ And they published some bridge lines. It is also possible that these were in the bridge list of the crazy guy called ‘scriptzteam’ on Github. In that case the IPs were public anyway.
¹The Tor exits are working again.

In general for non-hidden bridges, BridgeDistribution should remain at default = any. Rdsys selects the appropriate mechanism for distributing bridges. In some cases, it also selects the countries in which the bridge line will not be delivered.