I operate a Tor Bridge on a VPS in Europe. It uses obsf4 on port 443, and is distributed via HTTPS.
Normally, for the past several months, the metrics website reported ~30-35 active clients. I’d check the connections, and they were mostly from Russia and China.
However I’ve seen a sudden drop, now with just ~10 clients at a time, and mostly from US / countries with fairly open internet.
I wonder if my bridge somehow got identified and reported as such, so that many countries blocked it completely? (As in just block the IP for it). Any way I can test this theory?
Here is the metrics page if it is of interest: Relay Search
Sorry, did not notice your post in September…
Guess your IP is burned then. Have a look at /var/lib/tor/stats/bridge-stats regularly and see if it is worth keeping. You probably should get a new IP or server if your main motivation is to help censored individuals.
Maybe try a webtunnel on a new IP/server like you already suggested under the recent post about this topic.
Thanks for your reply. My main motivation was just to kinda help tor in general, and it seemed there was more of a need for bridges than entry relays. I guess there is still some value to this IP as an entry relay, but for the purpose as a bridge I will explore some other servers I have.
FYI for others, this is what the spike and subsequent dropped looked like:
