Why this problem is harder than a list of IP addresses
An MTProto proxy directory looks simple from the outside: a host, a port, a secret, and a button that opens Telegram. In practice, the useful part is everything around that data. Public proxies disappear, become overloaded, change latency, or stop accepting connections. A directory that only stores rows quickly becomes stale.
While working on mtproto.cloud, I ended up treating the page as a small reliability product rather than a static catalog. These are the engineering and UX principles that matter most.
1. Freshness is a feature
A proxy should never be presented as permanently available. The interface needs to communicate when it was last checked and whether the latest check succeeded. Fresh health information is more useful than a very large list.
