gm the censorship resistant social media nostr requires fully tunneled vpn to access from china because most of relays and clients are blocked by GFW.
and you're compromising your whole terminal's internet connection especially for the china based services.
so practically there's no way a user in china could frequently use nostr like they could access Twitter via eg, partially Sockes5 proxy, if they don't build their own relay and aggregation server.
ironically, standard vpns like Nordvpn is totally not accessible because they don't use any obfuscation for their WG alike tunnel and it's easily blocked.
Mullvad is great and accessible even tho the GFW is clearly easier to block its traffic.
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很多老外很天真的,不知道墙的威力😂
喊口号响得很,站着说话不腰疼
Orbot and private bridges. More reliable than any open VPN.
What about Amethyst with its integrated Tor proxy?
It is good to hear from China. Wishing you the best
oh I did not know that. 🥺 I thought the Nordvpn obfuscation works. So that is not the case? I've been with them for 8 yrs and counting 😬 though have not been in China yet. It's good to hear how others experience it esp heavily monitored country like China. ty for sharing.
that's a good question even tho i don't have an Android device.
but Tor is also 99% blocked by GFW even tho their traffic is not as easily identifiable as a standard WG traffic.
i didn't say 100% because when I was running a Tor Node years ago, there was a short period that my Channels were working.
SOCKS5 based proxies are more popular among users in china.
but technically it's not encrypted tunnel but just a proxy for the convenience of visiting blocked services.
it's just less privacy friendly.
Ah good to know. Did you try the obfuscation features of Tor like obfs4 bridges or Snowflake? Afaik they are explicitly designed to circumvent Tor censorship and hide the fact that the user is using Tor. However they need to be enabled manually.
They work neither, if you mean the public bridges. The point is the host list in route layer, not the protocol in network layer.
And we can NOT trust any bridges on the surface web: Bridge or Honeypot, are you sure?
And if you access porn sites only, the CN gov will be a kind of 'mercy'. Believe or not, we can tip the strip show girls(as '网红直播') by alypay, easy as order take out on Uber.
I don't know enough about Tor, but I'll ask anyway:
While I'm too scared to run a Tor exit node, I wonder if we could all help the Chinese people by running what I might call a Tor "entry node"?
The idea is that we all run something that can help the Chinese to access Tor, by forwarding connections to Tor. We could hide them inside our normal websites, so that connections to this entry node look like typical HTTPS connections.
We could be motivated to run these via bitcoin, where the users have to pay small amounts of bitcoin if they want a high bandwidth connection. If we all run these, then the Great Firewall would have to block very many entire websites
( @c03rad0r )
Yes, '(paid) socks5 proxy' is a simpler way to say what I said. But I (we😀) hope that Bitcoin changes things now by paying for a massive rollout of this. And we could pay Tor nodes too
How were payments made in Epoxy?
I think they used cashu (pre spillman). It was demoed I'm an earlier cohort..
Many systems (including bitcoind) don't directly have Tor support built in and they instead connect to a local socks5 proxy which is exposed by the Tor instance which is running locally too. So, after a little LLM research, here's what I'm thinking that somebody could do:
- Run the above, but expose the socks5 proxy to the internet. This exposes a socks5 proxy which directly forwards the request into Tor.
- But tweak the sock5 proxy so that it requires cashu spilman payments
- Now, given that we need a custom client which sends the payments, which can also encrypt the connection to socks5:
(but maybe that's exactly what epoxy did 😀)
(but maybe that's exactly what epoxy did 😀)Yes it sounds a lot like epoxy. Epoxy could probably still benefit spillman channels and more adoption though..

GitHub
GitHub - Origami74/nostr-epoxy-reverse-proxy: Are operating a relay NERP yet? Use this Nostr Epoxy Reverse Proxy to allow clients to proxy through your relay and earn sats.
Are operating a relay NERP yet? Use this Nostr Epoxy Reverse Proxy to allow clients to proxy through your relay and earn sats. - Origami74/nostr-ep...
i was actually running a Snowflake bridge on my Umbrel then, it worked for some time anyway. Then I guess it was totally blocked by the Wall after data been analyzed and pattern recognized.