does anyone here have experience hosting a Signal proxy and/or a Tor relay? there’s a blog post on signal.org asking for folks to help, and i can but i don’t know enough about network security to feel safe/confident doing some of this stuff. same with Tor - i’ve always wanted to host an exit relay (and in fact have this whole long theory about how every public library in the US should host an exit relay, but that’s for another post someday maybe).
do any of you have experience with doing this? what kind of best practices would you recommend? any good resources on protecting your network that you might point me to? i will be getting my Net+ cert within the next year but for now i am starting from “enthusiastic beginner” and want to be helpful, but careful.
Hosting a signal proxy is probably not a big deal if you don’t plan to ever travel to countries that have blocked Signal, but I would strongly advise against hosting a Tor exit node as a private individual. Tor is used for criminal activities all the time, and unless you have plausible deniability as an organization (and a good lawyer), it will be blamed on you personally.
Signal Proxy is fine, and it’s helpful for people who live in countries that block Signal. I ran it during Iran revolution. It’s only a nginx forward proxy.
Tor exit relay is a big no-no since you may expose yourself to illegal content. But you can run a relay without it being an exit node.
You don’t have to be an exit node to help; Have a look at setting up a Tor Snowflake proxy. I haven’t looked at Signal proxy, but I’ll check out that blog post.
If only the Signal Foundation made it as easy to set up a Signal server and connect Signal clients to it.
Yes. There are a few other chat clients that you can run relays for - Tox, SimpleX, Jabber/XMPP etc, which are worth investigating.
