this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Genuine question: Why would you use Tor to connect to Lemmy?
Tor is an incredibly useful tool to work around organization supported firewalls.
If you are doing stuff on Lemmy that your government would not approve of: STOP!!! We have stories of twitter and other social media sites outright volunteering information to authoritarian governments while having a CEO spew hate and vitriol on an hourly basis. And those are large companies with at least some degree of oversight.
Lemmy is instances hosted and managed by people in their off time. And you know almost nothing about those admins.
So if you are saying or looking at anything that you would not want the public to know: Do not fucking do it on Lemmy. There is still plenty of user activity that can be used to trace back to you if anyone ever cares enough.
Never underestimate the power of tracking cookies. You may think you are protecting your privacy but... you really aren't. And if you run ALL traffic through tor... you are in basically the exact same boat the moment one tracking cookie has been associated with the Dominos pizza down the street.
The fact that you are assuming someone wants to use Tor on Lemmy to do something illegal shows that you have fallen prey to the idea that Tor itself is illegal or meant for illegal activity, it's the driving force behind many of the pushes to block Tor or even to attempt to extinguish it.
Fact of the matter is Tor is a tool, a tool that like any is not inherently evil or illegal. Tor's purpose also isn't to facilitate illegal activity, its purpose is to provide privacy and anonymity to people who want it. It sounds to me like you have been listening to a lot of those "scary" deep web videos or assuming people use Tor for those reasons and not for legitimate privacy and security reasons, (like for example did you know that Lemmy doesn't proxy images?). This is one thing I really hate about those types of content, they portray the idea of privacy and security as if it's evil or nefarious, or that the idea of hosting your own hidden service is creepy or wrong, it's really gross actually, all for clicks and views, but they push it as if it's real, it's harmful to services like Lemmy which are currently outside of the mainstream and probably are associated with Dark web contend just by virtue of not being Big tech products, for a while I'd heard similar stories about linux too (people talked about how linux is for criminals, glad that one didn't catch on).
TL;DR you shouldn't be assuming that people want to use Tor (a privacy and security tool) for nefarious or evil purposes due to it's reputation with nontechnical people, especially when those people are known for spreading misleading or even wrong information about the subject itself.