Which will get blocked and go down, like, in no time. That's literally what happened in Russia - Tor is mostly unusable, you can't even bootstrap properly without some "tricks", so to speak.

Don't know, I use tor every day in Russia. Without it Internet would be unusable. The only problem I see is how to get initial distribution since the tor site is blocked.

Hmm... That's interesting. Maybe that depends on ISP, because my friends have told me they can't use Tor because they can't even bootstrap, even if they're using bridges.

I changed ISPs when moved from one city to another, no difference. Yes, there were several episodes when connecting required about half an hour of playing changing setting but eventually I could connect. Nowadays it seems that the government abandoned their efforts to block Tor traffic and mainly focused on blocking VPN and Telegram.

Now that (abandoning the efforts to block Tor so now it mostly works) sounds like some good news to me! Can you please share your settings or what exactly you use that works for you? Perhaps they will help my friends, too, because previously, they relied on Tor to circumvent the "network blockade", but it just stopped working for them at some point. And yes, they tried to play with settings as well but it didn't really help.

By the way, the level of ban enforcement can also vary from region to region regardless of ISPs (at least that's what I heard from some people), but anyway...

I use bridging. Not going to disclose the address, sorry. I had to try several bridges obtained via Tor itself and via telegram before one worked.

Well, that makes some sense. My friends tried some bridges as well, but some of them didn't work from the beginning, while others got blocked (probably; the exact reason why they don't work anymore is unknown) later.