I am proposing that PG should cover topics related to anti-censorship (tools like Tor and others Jonah mentioned in his comment) and while not conflating it with anti-surveillance tools like VPNs.
What Jonah said made sense and it would only behoove the community and those new and learning about these tools and technologies to better understand the circumstances under which to use which tool if this information was available and if it were discussed more in forms of official articles, guides, videos, and even wiki posts by PG.
This would clear the more often than not misinformed air around the often conflated tools like VPNs and tools like Tor (as they are technically made to be used for different purposes even though they can be used for the same purpose).
I am a bit confused about the suggestion. Is this supposed to be a new tool category, if so what are the proposed criteria? Or is this supposed to be something for the knowledge base or even a community wiki?
Something for the knowledge base and a new tool category - or however PG decides to frame and explain this on the website.
I don’t think I am technically adept to conclusively comment on this - hence this community post to crowdsource all your opinions and ideas for the PG team to put together based on what’s true and what makes sense (should they approve this idea which I am hoping they would as it would fill in the gap Jonah himself explained - as I see it atleast).
My thinking right now is that it should probably be a new tool category, and part of we should figure out is what we want to call that category to differentiate it from the existing one(s). We could potentially have two similar but distinct things here:
VPN providers to avoid network/mass surveillance
VPN providers to bypass network filters and censorship
One benefit of creating this distinction is that it would be a good place to start recommending self-hostable VPN tools like Outline and AmneziaWG.
In the past some people here have been against this, because this is a poor idea for avoiding website tracking and surveillance if you are basically assigning yourself a static IP.
However, in the real world there are many people who get a massive benefit from these tools that are more focused on obfuscation and anti-censorship, that outweighs the fingerprinting downside of not using a standard commercial VPN provider.
To add to what you said (with which I concur)- there are many peoples and countries where the primary goal is to get free internet and access to information and not necessarily the privacy and security advantages traditional VPNs provide (I have traveled enough to learn this myself).
So, such distinctions would indeed be beneficial for people reading and learning make the right choice for the tool for their use case.
The world is a big place and many people use and need somewhat different tools using similar tech for their particular needs.
Sorry if this is dumb but, trying to understand the scope of what would be appropriate for this section (outside of the examples @jonah has listed). Would something like hosting a Snowflake server be considered?
Well, that’s one of the points of this post/suggestion/proposal - to figure this out as there clearly is a need for some distinction indeed.
While I am OP, this is more of a nudge to the community so they may share what they think, feel, want, need, or have PG require if such distinctions for such tools are to be made official in some capacity.
I don’t have all the answers and am hoping the community to pitch in.
I think yes, if it be deemed that it serves the purpose for which this distiction is going to be made explicit.
I’m neutral, leaning towards supportive, on the idea. Keep in mind that the anti-censorship fight doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution, so creating a page with productive information would require a significant amount of oversight and updating. The approaches and levels of internet censorship vary greatly from country to country and change frequently. What works in China in August 2025 might not work in Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Qatar, Turkmenistan, and so on… Maintaining such a page with useful information might be beyond the scope of PG in terms of the effort required.
If you want to get a sense of what I’m talking about, look into tools like V2ray, Xray, VLESS, XTLS, Vision, Shadowsocks, XHTTP, and uTLS. These are just a few examples that come to mind. The world of anti-censorship is vast, and perhaps one of these tools would work in your region. However, this leads to a second point: many of these solutions might not meet a hypothetical set of criteria, and those that do (e.g., some more mature projects) might no longer be effective. So, does PG remove the need for criteria for this specific page, or does PG have a more lenient standard for anti-censorship tools? Something to consider.
But a simpler page that covers the basics and then links to other trusted, censorship evasion-focused communities could be a viable solution.
I think that is a legitimate problem. A lot of the cutting edge in anti-censorship is kind of run by rando providers, who would probably not meet the trustworthiness levels of other providers we recommend. Making it clear that using some of these tools could actually harm your privacy if you use them when you don’t need anti-censorship tools is important here.
The Chinese GFW circumvention tech names are insane. There’s V2ray, VMESS, VLESS-RELAITY, etc. Most of these are protocols and/or software you’re expected to host on your own infrastructure though. My main concern is that I don’t think we have a lot of Chinese contributors who’d keep up with the state of the art tech.
If these anti censorahip tools are VPNs, they should be in the VPN category. We can just explain the specific aim of their project, which may be more specific than Mullvad etc. (?) Afaik Proton and Mullvad also try to escape censorship, and work (not all the time obviously).
Do the VPNs in the second category also have DNS block lists ? And other tools to fight network/mass surveillance ? If so, the two categories are definitely mixed.
The VPNs in the first category very much try to appear as VPNs of the second category…
I can see why it may be confusing but we can certainly word it such that it is not and is clear enough to make the difference explicit. We/PG will just have to come up with a way to do that.