Tor in 2025: a status report

The network is smaller than its peak and better maintained than at any point in the last decade. Both of those are true and neither makes a good headline.

Relays, bridges, and the blocking arms race

Bridge distribution remains the pressure point. The pluggable transports work until a censor invests in a classifier, and then a new transport ships, and the cycle repeats at a cadence measured in years rather than weeks.

What to expect

For browsing, it is usable. For anything latency-sensitive, it is not, and no amount of tuning changes that — the latency is the anonymity.