FirstMajesticComet

Exactly, people should be able to live their lives without being judged for what gender they are or how they present.

Indeed, this is why I feel that assigned gender is a very hostile construct which is imposed upon people. People (usually righties, but it seems everyone is guilty of this argument) claim "iT's jUst aN oBseRvAtioN" when it's actually quite arbitrary, since they can just choose for intersex people (and often choose wrong) what's worse is that for intersex people who do have id done wrong to them people will say "it wasn't wrong, you're just trans (a minimization argument I hear a lot which is really gross, demeaning, and invalidating) which stings even harder when it's from members of the LGBTQIA who are supposed to be supportive, I had a friend who went through this and everyone insisted he was a trans man, even though he knew from his medical records.

I sometimes wear hoodies (not dysphoria hoodies 🙃) in the summer even when it's like that because oddly enough I occasionally get chills and feel cold, even though it's usually over 32C I don't know why it happens and it sucks when it does (especially when people ask me why I'm shivering when it's hot outside).

I think you're either overselling their defensive capabilities (like mods there do) or the solutions you used are just leaky and awful. I've found Tor to work very well, less complicated than the solutions you presented since it's basically an all in one. I had an account on there for almost a year only through Tor so it works well, but I lost the password and since I used a throwaway email account is gone for good, but still not shadowbanned.

I have 4 other accounts (I'm not going to say which ones they are, makes the job of admins harder) still been going for over two months.

You can usually appeal shadow-bans and they overturn them I've found, you have to send an appeal showing both that you know but also pretend you don't know why otherwise they'll think they owned you.

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.

I know they require them, it's is the way that they're implemented that I'm referring to. Like they made it deliberately frustrating. Some of them one a few websites even pop up twice or even three times and you have to click them multiple times to get them to go down.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that much of Europe has privacy laws that protect their citizens and also makes it so people running nodes there don't have to kiss up to US companies. Hence why they block those nodes or just give them a huge amount of challenges to solve in hopes to frustrate them. Same with how they put annoying privacy pop-ups on the website in European locations which re-appear every time you login or visit the site.

In my experience it's a bit slower but not by much, I usually only access text based websites over Tor though with minimal images, streaming over YouTube can be horribly slow but it's generally worked okay for me.

Might also be a good idea to use something like Ublock origin and Portmaster as well, don't just try to curate ad targeting, block them, if you want to still support websites you can use something like adnauseam which clicks the ads.

I'm not trying to say that Tor isn't a good idea because they should be blocking ads, I think more people should absolutely use it for better anonymous browsing, I only bring up ad blockers because if people don't want to be targeted ads they should be blocking them.

Bonus: Add anti-adblock filters to ad-block, it helps significantly with sites that try to detect them, also spam and malware filters are essential.

Hate to burst your bubble but many of the stories are just that, stories. Vast majority of the onion sites out there are either forums like 4chan or hobbyist sites like the old days of the internet.

Illegal websites do exist but they're rare and hard to find, they also are subject to being taken down. They're nothing like the stories though. In fact majority of the websites that exist when you search for these topics are just bitcoin scams, i.e. a livestream website that asks you to pay $200 in bitcoin to enter, almost certainly a scam because livestreaming over Tor is terrible due to low spead and it breaks the anonymity due to generating tons of unique traffic.

TL;DR Tor is a tool that can be used for privacy on the clearnet it can also be used to host your own onion sites. Dark web stories do have a small element of truth to them but are mostly scary stories to tell in the dark.

I use it, it's a bit slow and you sometimes get lots of captchas but overall I think it's pretty good.