Investigate why some users aren't connecting to our private bridges

In the last months I've been working on building relationship with relay operators that could run private obfs4 bridges. After getting their bridge address, I provided these private bridges to users in some countries with filtered/censored internet (mostly by email/Frontdesk). But after some months, some relay operators told me that didn't see any user connected and they were concerned if that was the best way to use their resources and contribute to the network. The operators ended up switching to a private bridge distributed over HTTPS/Moat. Last time I talked with them, they seemed to be happy with the number of users connected to their bridge.

I also provided my own private bridge to a group of people that we did a bridge workshop and I saw some traffic for a while (some days after the workshop) and then it stopped. So, I guess we need to keep promoting the bridge until is shared more widely in groups.

Lesson learned: In order to have private bridges maintained by the community, we need to match the bridge operator expectation and also add more time to build our own distribution networks on those countries.

Tasks:

• Reach out to users on frontdesk and ask them if everything is ok, and if they tried to connect to the bridge.
• Contact nonprofits that are working in Global South and ask them if they want a) workshop: learn how to setup private bridge; b) have some private bridges to use.
• We have some user interviews scheduled to the end of this month, and I hope we can get more insights about usability issues that these users are facing.