Over the many years that we’ve operated our free and public federated chat services, XMPP.is and the Unredacted Matrix server, we’ve quickly and effectively responded to abuse reports and made great strides in clamping down on the blatant abuse of our services. This hasn’t come without a cost, as we’ve spent countless hours banning thousands of accounts and rooms involved in all sorts of nefarious behavior.
Our moderation efforts
While we attempt to moderate effectively, XMPP has been and is notoriously hard to develop moderation solutions for. For example, we have to perform all actions on the command-line and develop scripts that parse through the flat-file storage of our server (it doesn’t use a DB). Generally, XMPP users are much more well-behaved from our observations and lack of abuse reports. We haven’t had a huge problem with abusive users besides the occasional spammer. It’s also hard to keep tabs on statistics for XMPP moderation, so we don’t have many unfortunately.
Matrix is a different story, with a proper database and a robust admin API – we are enabled to do much more. We’re able to look back at our stats, and see what we’ve done so far.
We’ve compiled some information on our efforts below.
We have blocked over 600 rooms from external Matrix servers involved in the distribution of harmful content based on room names, descriptions and other observed patterns.
Locked nearly 500 user accounts which signed up to our Matrix server and engaged in nefarious behavior.
Installed the Draupnir moderation bot, which will enable us to properly moderate our rooms and protect against various spam attacks.
Began the exploration of new moderation solutions which allow us to automate parts of our work.
New rules
Although Unredacted advocates for free speech, objectively harmful or even dubiously harmful content that harms humans or animals is not welcome. It potentially jeopardizes the good natured people using our servers as a haven from the dragnet surveillance from governments and that which is employed by many of the corporate world’s unencrypted and insecure chat services.
We spent a very long time thinking about what is fair, and attempting to not be too rigid at the same time. A part of this process was asking our community for feedback as well. We felt that we’ve come up with the right set of rules, and it’s time to implement them. Our goal here is to create communities that are as safe as possible, and without having to moderate each user and room closely. As such, users and rooms created on our chat services must comply with the following rules.
Chat Service Rules
Illegal or objectively harmful content is not allowed.
No CSAM (including real/fictional/illustrations/AI/3D), threats of violence, or content that harms humans or animals.
Violence, gore, or disturbing imagery is not allowed.
No media, discussions or rooms that glorify violence, gore, abuse, or any extreme content that harms humans or animals.
No promoting, glorifying, encouraging, or normalizing behaviors, ideologies, or practices that are harmful, abusive, or illegal to humans or animals.
Don’t be a jerk in official Unredacted rooms and discussions.
This means no excessive trolling or lack of general civility.
NSFW themes are not allowed in Official Rooms.
No adult content which includes no clearly NSFW media, discussions, or profile pictures in official Unredacted rooms.
NSFW rooms have rules.
NSFW rooms on Unredacted server must comply to these rules. These rooms must:
Be and remain unpublished from the server’s room directory.
Room Owners are required to join the “Unredacted Room Owners” room. (Request an invite from a server admin or mod).
Moderate their rooms and ensure a zero tolerance rule for illegal content.
Report illegal content in the “Unredacted Room Owners” room or contact a server admin directly.
Illegal acts and content will lead to an instant ban. Otherwise, we will issue you a warning if you are breaking any of the rules. If you continue to break the rules you will be banned.
Our thought process
As there will be some that disagree with our new rules and decision to implement them, we want to explain ourselves and our thought process going into this. We don’t intend to force a version of religious morality. We intend to be fair and just in our decisions, and want to promote peace.
Part of our mission is to “operate with transparency, morality and empathy with the purpose of benefiting all living beings.” There is a lot of content on the Internet that is not in line with those values, and frankly; we want to keep it off our services (as we have always done in a legal context). Content which harms humans or animals is simply objectively abhorrent. It doesn’t promote goodness or civility. It actively subverts all of what we stand for.
What’s next?
As of the posting of this blog, the rules will have gone into effect. Over time, we will slowly reach out to users and room owners which violate these new rules (which are not illegal). Depending on the severity of the violations we will generally give existing room owners a grace period before removing their rooms. Any new rooms which violate these rules will be removed at our discretion.
2024 has been a great year for us at Unredacted, growing in many ways that we didn’t even imagine were so quickly possible. We set out to explore whether becoming a 501(c)(3) non-profit was feasible. We ended up putting in the research and work to do it, and we formally incorporated as Unredacted Inc in May and received our 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS in June. We received a huge amount of support, from kind words to donations, and even a grant from the Human Rights Foundation. All of the support we’ve received has inspired us and allows us to continue our growth.
2025 will surely be a difficult and challenging year for the fight against Internet censorship, and the fight for everyone’s right to privacy. Access to free and open information is as extremely important as it ever was. With some level of critical thinking, the truth can be found. We’re refocusing and doubling down on our mission to fight Internet censorship and protect people’s privacy by building out more censorship-resistant and privacy-friendly Internet infrastructure and services, while polishing the existing.
So much has already happened, so read on to see in full detail what we accomplished in 2024.
This year, we put a lot of work into the content and design of our website. The front page was redesigned, we added breadcrumbs on nearly all pages for easier navigation, and redesigned our donation page. Furthermore, we added new pages and content such as our transparency report, Supporters page and launched Unredacted Updates, where you can get a summary of what we’ve worked on each month. Transparency is important to us, and there will be more to come in 2025.
Want to read more about the inner-workings our projects & services? Check out our blog!
Hardware
Unredacted has largely operated on a mix of dedicated hardware that we rent from various hosting providers. Unfortunately one of those providers, Hetzner, mysteriously cancelled our account at the end of October. We’ve since migrated to more reliable providers. However, important infrastructure such as our Tor exit relays, XMPP.is, and Unredacted Matrix server run on top of rented dedicated servers still. This past year, we’ve pursued purchasing and colocating hardware that we fully own. So far, we’ve built out redundant edge routers, aggregation switches and a PoE switch (seen below) which will power a special project that we’re working on. We won’t give any hints on what the PoE powered Raspberry Pis are for now, but we’ll be announcing how and why we built them in early 2025. What we’ll say is that they’re scalable, efficient and more affordable to operate in the long run.
We’re also in the process of building an high-availability virtualization cluster with Ceph for storage too. That hardware is still in testing, but we plan to fully deploy it in early 2025 as well. The new cluster will power XMPP.is, the Unredacted Matrix server and various other new services that we’ll spin up in 2025.
The hardware purchases that we made wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing support and donations we’ve received from our community. We’d especially like to thank the Human Rights Foundation for providing a grant to us.
Network
For a long time, we have operated our own network on top of one of our hosting providers. Recently, we became an ARIN member and received our own ASN (Autonomous System Number), AS401401 – which, in HTTP status codes means “Unauthorized.” ARIN must have thought we were cool. 🙂
We also received IPv6 and IPv4 prefixes, which we’ve started advertising to our upstream providers. Our edge network at the time of writing consists of 18 virtual machines across various hosting providers for diversity and redundancy. We built this network for the special project mentioned above in the hardware section, and in 2025 we’ll write about how and why we built it on our blog.
Operation Envoy: Defeating Censors
In July of 2023, we started Operation Envoy, an initiative that consists of ‘envoys’ which help to deliver messages (packets) to and from the Tor network. This helps users experiencing Internet censorship, or those who wish to mask their use of Tor. Previously, we focused heavily on deploying Tor snowflake proxies around the world.
This year, Operation Envoy had its 1st year anniversary. We thought a lot about Operation Envoy’s future, and we decided that it should consist of more than just Tor bridges. Operation Envoy now consists of everything we operate that helps people reach the free and open Internet, or particular services such as Signal & Telegram.
Around the same time last year, we had served around 121TiB of traffic in a single 30 day period. As of December of 2024, in the last 30 days we’ve served over 192TiB of traffic to across all Operation Envoy services, which is a significant increase, but also due to the reclassification of what an ‘envoy’ is to us.
30 days of past traffic (Dec, 2024)
If we continue to average at this new rate of bandwidth over a year, that would be over 2.2PiB!
Last year, we ended with 31 CPU cores and 53GiB of RAM. Looking at CPU core and RAM counts now, we ended the year with 91 cores and 106GiB of RAM, which is again a significant increase – but also due to the reclassification.
24 hour hour stats on CPU & RAM usage (Dec, 2024)
Our anonymized & aggregated Operation Envoy metrics are publicly accessible, and you can see the direct impact that we’re making.
In 2025, we will continue expanding our CPU core and RAM counts, but we can’t do it without your help! If you like what we do and want to support our mission, consider making a donation.
FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship
FreeSocks, our service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to people in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship was open sourced in June. It also hit its first year of existence in December of 2024, and has expanded rapidly.
Since its launch, FreeSocks has issued over 10,000 access keys to people looking to circumvent Internet censorship. This is an amazing milestone, and we’re happy to be helping so many people across the world. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback, and it has inspired us to continue our work on the service.
A screenshot of the FreeSocks website
In 2025, we’ll be continuing our work on a full rewrite of the freesocks-control-plane (FCP), the code which powers FreeSocks and allows for access keys to be issued, and have their state tracked. The rewrite will convert the existing code from JavaScript to TypeScript, and feature an API + web control panel which will allow us and others to manage their FCP deployment much more easily.
A sneak peek of the new FCP control panel
We’re also planning to potentially move away from Outline’s server software, and utilize raw Shadowsocks, Vmess, VLESS and Trojan proxies to offer more options to our users. To note, existing access keys and Outline’s client will still work with raw Shadowsocks.
We can’t run free & awesome services like this without your help.
Tor exit relays
In our efforts to help people evade censorship, and protect their right to privacy, we have operated numerous high-bandwidth Tor exit relays since 2021.
We’re currently #20 in the top exit families, and have a 0.55% exit probability according to OrNetStats. That means your connection through Tor may be one of the 0.55% which exits traffic through our relays.
A screenshot from OrNetStats
Currently, we have around 5Gb/s of throughput capacity (3Gb/s more since last year), however in practice this has been lackluster due to hosting provider network congestion and rate-limits. With our new hardware, we’re planning to migrate all of our Tor exit relays to our colocation in early 2025, which should allow for better throughput and control.
Our Tor exit relay bandwidth bitrate over the past 30 days
Regardless, over the past 30 days we have received and transmitted over 366TiB of bandwidth. If this rate continued for a year, that would still be over 4.2PiB of bandwidth usage for a whole year, quite an achievement.
Our bandwidth usage over a single 24 hour period
With your help, we can do even more, and continue to push a lot of traffic for the Tor network.
Unredacted Proxies
In 2024, we quietly announced Unredacted Proxies – which allow people to connect to messaging services such as Signal and Telegram, without exposing the fact to their ISP or government.
Unredacted Proxies are a part of Operation Envoy, and are quite useful to many people around the world where Signal & Telegram are blocked. We’ve had a lot of good feedback about the service, and while we don’t directly count the amount of users – we can see that it’s being utilized by many when looking at bandwidth metrics. We’ve particularly seen great interest from people in Russia and Iran.
For those interested in the technical side, we use Signal’s TLS Proxy and Telegram’s MTProto for our proxies.
Chat services
Our oldest projects are our chat services. XMPP.is was launched in 2015 and our Matrix server was launched in 2021. For many years, thousands of individuals have used our chat servers to exchange messages back and forth between friends and family. These remain a crucial part of our mission, as it allows people to communicate securely and privately. We regularly maintain and update these services, but there’s nothing notable to announce for them this year.
If you want to chat with us and other like-minded people, why not join one of our communities?
Funding
Las year, we struggled with funding. However, this year has been amazing in terms of funding. We received a record amount of donations, and even received a grant from the Human Rights Foundation! We’re eternally grateful to our community and supporters, and we promise to always use your money effectively. To date, no one at Unredacted makes any money for the work they do, and we intend to keep it this way until we are fully sustainable.
2024 EoY Balance Totals (USD):
Cryptocurrency balances (calculated at time of writing): $35,681
Bank balance (at the time of writing): $246 Total: $35,927
We expect that with our current expense and growth rate, these funds will allow us to smoothly operate for at least 2-3 years. To continue our mission, and rapidly expand, we’ll need your support! We have many very ambitious and interesting work & projects in 2025.
If you want to support us, we allow one-time or recurring donations via multiple payment methods, including PayPal, credit cards, cryptocurrency (including XMR & ZEC), Open Collective, Patreon & Liberapay.
In 2025, we plan to be much more transparent in terms of our spending and funding.
What’s next?
In 2025, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ll be building out new infrastructure, creating new services and revamping existing ones. We’re expanding at a rapid pace, and we’re going to continue doing so. The fight against Internet censorship and for people’s right to privacy will be especially important in the coming year.
From our humble beginnings in 2015, to now (almost 2024), we’ve undergone many significant changes in the almost 9 years of our existence. We’ve established ourselves as a legitimate organization that is on a mission to fight Internet censorship, and provide various services to individuals & organizations seeking privacy and security. In 2023, a lot of work has been done to accomplish that mission. That’s why we’re starting our own “year in review” to go over all of the major developments that continue to challenge and inspire us.
In July of 2023, we started Operation Envoy, an effort to scale up our Tor bridge and snowflake proxy operations that help deliver messages (packets) to and from the Tor network. This helps users experiencing Internet censorship, or those who wish to mask their use of Tor. We focused heavily on deploying snowflake proxies around the world. At the start of the operation we were serving 93TB of symmetrical snowflake proxy traffic looking at the past 30 days.
30 days of past traffic at the start of the operation (July 2023)
As of December of 2023, in the last 30 days we’ve served over 121TB of symmetrical traffic to snowflake proxy users. We started with 34 CPU cores and 58GB of RAM from servers deployed around the world. We’re ending the year with the same core count, but with a bit less RAM at 53GB. However, we’ve served more traffic due to server provider changes and software upgrades.
30 days of past traffic at the end of 2023 (December 2023)
Our Operation Envoy metrics are publicly accessible, and can show you the direct impact that we’re making. Have a look.
In 2024, we will continue expanding our CPU core and RAM counts, but we can’t do it without your help! If you like what we do and want to support our mission, consider making a donation.
FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship
To continue our efforts and follow our mission in providing censorship-resistant Internet access, in late December we launched FreeSocks. A service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to individuals in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship.
A screenshot of the FreeSocks website
We’ve spread news about the service on social media, and we’ve seen a gradual and steady increase in users since the launch.
In 2024, we will scale the service to meet our user’s needs and write a blog post about how we built the core of FreeSocks on Cloudflare Workers in a privacy respecting way. Again, we can’t run services like these without your help.
Tor exit relays
In addition to our front-line censorship circumvention services, we have run numerous high-bandwidth Tor exit relays for many years.
We’ve recently become #16 in the top exit families, and have a 1.03% exit probability according to OrNetStats. That means, you may be one of the 1% of Tor network users who exit traffic through our relays.
A screenshot from OrNetStats
Over the past 30 days, we’ve greatly improved our Tor exit relay setup, which consists of 2 hypervisors. Each having an Intel Xeon E-2276G, 64GB of RAM and a 1Gb/s NIC. We’ve spent a lot of time revising this setup to maximize bandwidth and resource usage.
Our Tor exit relay bandwidth bitrate over the past 30 days
This optimized setup has allowed us to push 2Gb/s of symmetrical traffic at any given time. In a single 24 hour period, we pushed nearly 20TB of traffic through our relays.
Our bandwidth usage over a single 24 hour period
If we continue at this rate for 365 days, that would be close to 7.3PB (Petabytes) of traffic for an entire year. With your help, we can do even more than this, and continue pushing tons traffic for Tor network users.
Unredacted Guides
In November of 2023, we launched Unredacted Guides. We aim to aid users in setting up, configuring and launching privacy/security focused software. It’s one thing to run these services ourselves, but helping others do the same only increases awareness and impact.
In 2024, we will continue to refine existing guides and write new ones in accordance with our mission.
Chat services
Our oldest projects are our chat services. XMPP.is was launched in 2015 and our Matrix server was launched in 2021. For many years, thousands of individuals have used our chat servers to exchange messages back and forth between friends and family. These remain a crucial part of our mission, as it allows people to communicate securely and privately.
In November, we made efforts to secure XMPP.is based on the teachings from the jabber.ru MITM attack, and shared our work in a blog post.
We will continue to maintain, monitor and secure our chat services for the years to come.
Infrastructure changes
Over the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to our server orchestration and the security of our services and website.
We use many self-written Ansible roles and playbooks to deploy and maintain our servers. We’ve made a lot of refinements in this area which has made deploying and maintaining new services easier than ever.
On the security side, we’ve utilized Cloudflare Access heavily on critical parts of our websites and locked down server access behind Tailscale. In 2024, a focus of ours will be to further secure our infrastructure from potential attacks.
Funding
While we’ve always paid for our services mostly out of pocket, 2023 was unfortunately one of the lowest in terms of funding, and it was far under our operational costs (domains, servers & SaaS providers). With that said, we greatly appreciate those that made contributions. Any amount helps us in carrying out our mission.
2023 Donation Totals (USD):
Cryptocurrency (calculated at time of writing): $127 Stripe (credit cards): $68 PayPal: $23 Total: $218
To continue our mission, we need your support! We allow one-time or recurring donations via multiple payment methods, including PayPal, credit cards, cryptocurrency, Open Collective, Patreon & Liberapay.
In 2024, we will launch a fundraiser in an attempt to cover our operational costs. This will be announced later.
What’s next?
Regardless of funding for our services in 2024, we will make an attempt to expand them, and create new ones. We’ll continue working on awesome projects, and providing them to the masses.
In 2024, we will explore the possibility of becoming a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and assess it’s feasibility. We’ve always been non-profit focused, but legitimizing ourselves as a US tax deductible non-profit has its perks and it may be the next step in the growth and expansion of our organization.
