Originally a conceptual exploration & research project, Snowflake is Snowstorm's predecessor; an open source project for internet censorship circumvention, years later this project has taken on a central role in censorship circumvention via the Tor Project as the first use-case, with direct application in the ongoing Ukraine & Russia crisis, and all around the world. As you can see, censorship did ramp up significantly in December 2021, and early 2022, with a corresponding surge in snowflake users.
All around the world, the internet is filtered, blocked, and manipulated. This is bad. When the internet is compromised, not only will you be unable to reliably communicate with friends, family, and the world, your reality itself will be compromised. Yours & many people's understanding of what is happening will undoubtedly be distorted in many ways, and your mind itself will come under assault by the infowar, as we've all seen happen throughout the last few years, pandemic and epistemic collapse ad accelerando. And, everybody shall live in fear, confusion, and violence, as the world splinters and spirals downwards whilst x-risks increase. People will die. People already have. But we can still do something about it.
Snowflake uses webrtc peer-to-peer connections to create very hard to block ephemeral proxies.
1- Volunteers visit websites which host the "Snowflake Proxy".
2- Tor clients automatically find available browser proxies over the domain fronted signaling channel (Broker).
3- Tor Snowflake client and Browser's Snowflake Proxy establish a WebRTC peer connection.
4- Proxy connects to some relay.
5- Tor occurs.
This is enough to cause it to be one of the few actually functional circumvention methods & channels of communications currently in use in the ongoing crisis.