Effective Anti-Censorship is a Partnership Between Technology and People

Internet freedom doesn’t happen through technology alone. It doesn’t happen through goodwill alone. What actually works is the combination of both: continuous technical innovation, and the engagement and participation of the ordinary people for whom it matters most — the people in the censored country, and those in the diaspora. Psiphon learned that lesson during one of the most severe internet shutdowns the world has ever witnessed: the one we just went through in Iran, in early 2026.

The Power of the Diaspora

On January 30, 2026, at the peak of Iran’s worst-ever internet restrictions, Psiphon recorded more than 9.5 million unique daily users inside the country — more than one in ten Iranians, on a single platform, in a single day. As the shutdown grew in scope and impact, half of the traffic supported by Psiphon was flowing through Conduit stations hosted by members of the Iranian diaspora. They responded en masse, and it’s because of that enthusiastic and committed participation that Psiphon was able to keep supporting Iranians during the crisis.

In the two weeks following Iran’s most severe disruptions, approximately 200,000 diaspora members signed up to run Conduit stations — not for their own access, but to help people inside reconnect. Using spare phones and home Wi-Fi connections, they built a distributed network that carried nearly half of all Psiphon bandwidth reaching Iran. Iranians who had been offline for two weeks started to reach their family and loved ones again through social media and messaging services.

In other words, the diaspora wasn’t just supporting the infrastructure — the diaspora was the infrastructure. The Russian diaspora can build the same resilient network.

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

Censorship works when there’s a centralized target to hit. But because Conduit is a participatory network, it’s a moving target. Every station — whether it’s running on an ordinary device, on a residential connection, or on a commercial network — becomes part of a distributed, growing network with no single point of failure. A government trying to suppress tens of thousands of individually operated stations, spread across dozens of countries, faces a far more challenging problem than blocking a server or a network. And the more people participate, the tougher that problem becomes to solve. That’s what makes Conduit so effective: it harnesses the power of ordinary people to make an extraordinary difference.

Show Your Extraordinary Love Through Conduit

You can download Conduit for free and host your own Conduit Station.

Or you can subscribe to Hosted Conduit. Through Hosted Conduit’s personal pairing feature, you can directly support up to 99 friends and family members inside Russia, giving the people you care about a trusted, reliable connection to the open internet. At the same time, your Hosted Conduit station contributes to the global anti-censorship capacity.

The cost is just cents a day. And every person who joins makes the network stronger for everyone who depends on it.

You may not be able to change Russian policy from the outside. But you can be part of a movement that makes censorship harder to enforce, one station at a time. Conduit worked in Iran, and you can help make it work in Russia.

Join the movement at conduit.psiphon.ca.

As a business, finding and growing your customer base in Russia may seem impossible. It doesn't have to be. For many business sectors, Russia remains a market with active users and ongoing demand across sectors such as digital services, financial platforms, e-commerce, logistics, SaaS, and media delivery. With a population of approximately 143 million people, Russia is a large and dynamic market with tremendous potential, but potential that is out of reach without the right infrastructure.

Unfortunately, over the last decade or so, the Russian Internet has moved from a relatively open and reliable network to one that is highly centralized and controlled, and in some cases, inaccessible to specific applications. Russia's internet environment is now a moving target in which traffic can be unpredictably filtered, blocked or degraded in real time. From e-commerce to media, from logistics to mobile enabled SaaS platforms, applications requiring network continuity will often encounter significant and unpredictable network functioning, including a complete loss of access to customers and services.

Functioning within the Russian market now depends on how well your application performs under rapidly changing, or even hostile network conditions, translating directly into substantial business impact and risk. Even traditionally utilized VPNs, once the dependable goto as a customer workaround, are now often detected and disrupted. The bottom line is that the underlying issue - network reliability - is predictably unpredictable, introducing friction at the most critical points of the user journey.

For many businesses, this has forced the need to confront the reality that continuing to provide services in Russia is simply an untenable business proposition, and the result is a decision to pull out of the Russian market altogether. This does not have to be the case, however.

Adapting and Thriving: Operating effectively in this environment requires a shift in mindset. Connectivity can no longer be assumed, it must be proactively managed within the application itself. Psiphon Forge is built for precisely this purpose, offering a lightweight, embeddable API that enables applications to adapt to changing network conditions in real time. By leveraging multiple connection methods, dynamic routing, and traffic obfuscation, Forge helps maintain reliable access even as individual pathways are blocked or degraded. Rather than relying on a fixed connection strategy, applications can continuously adjust, ensuring that core functions, transactions, messaging, data transfer, remain available to users.

Turning Constraint into Continuity, Challenge into Opportunity: For companies operating in Russia, connectivity challenges are no longer an edge case - they are simply part of the baseline environment. The organizations that succeed in Russia, and other regions with challenging network environments, will be those that are designed for this reality, building resilience directly into their products. Ultimately, the opportunity to find, keep, and grow a customer base is there for those willing to embrace the challenge. With the right approach, that challenge becomes an opportunity within an environment that has fewer and fewer competitors.

Learn more about how Psiphon Forge supports resilient connectivity: https://forge.psiphon.ca