Hello.
Today I noticed that some of the relays in the network are funded by tor.foundation.
What Tor Project team thinks about such initiative?
I’m asking because I remember how lots of relays related to crypto project were banned and I don’t want repetition of that situation. It is better to have open discussion early.
Related to the matter, @gus tried to get a reply and to learn more about them in the mailing list, but to no avail. I don’t know if he had contacted them in private and if they answered.
It is possible to know what relays are publicly founded by them by a simple query: Relay Search
Some weeks ago they changed their public name on their website from ‘Tor Foundation’ to ‘The Onion Relays Foundation’, but the domain name stayed as it was, as well as their brand logo, which is generated using AI, interestingly.
@tor-relays:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-August/021834.html
[tor-relays] Supporting TOR: Seeking Affordable and Reliable Server Providers in Eastern Europe (and thread followups)
It may have happened because of confusing nature of mailing lists.
Their website have link to Signal group.
If questions will be ignored there as well, then yeah, it will mean people don’t want to communicate.
Personally I would consider this to be donations to relay operators rather than “incentives,” so unless I’m missing something I don’t think the proposed policy at [proposal] Guidelines for sustainability and incentivization proposals in the Tor Community (#22) · Issues · The Tor Project / Community / Policies · GitLab should apply to this sort of group.