The more you know! It seems the best way to learn is still by saying the wrong thing online

You aren’t hosting any of the images from federated instances, so legally you should be fine. I do agree that the clutter from them can be a huge pain though, and I don’t see many users from those instances involved in SFW conversion

Disclaimer that I haven’t used Tor in a while, do your own research, etc

The US navy designed and open sourced the Tor network. If all the traffic meant to be anonymous was coming from the US navy it doesn’t work well as an anonymizer. There’s been various claims that they have backdoors over the years, but to my knowledge none have held water.

Unless you’re running an exit node (which requires different software than the Tor browser) other people’s traffic isn’t getting routed through you so you’re fine legally.

VPNs are not very good at protecting you from the websites or services you connect to. They’re best used to hide where you’re connecting to from your ISP. Modern fingerprinting using things like browsing habits, installed software, web browser size, cookies, etc is barely effected by VPNs and the Tor browser takes care of an minimizes lots of those tools.

The biggest issue for day to day use for me is how slow it is. Because your traffic is being routed through 3-5 nodes before getting to its destination overall speed and latency suffer a lot

Give me neovim or give me death