For the past four months beehaw has been unreachable to those of us on the Tor network. Glad to see access was finally restored. Was there an attack?
I could really use a way to periodically backup my posts to my local disk so if Tor is spontaneously blocked again I at least have my history. I’ve not found a Lemmy equivalent for Mastodon Archive.
(edit) For security, it would be a good idea to setup an onion instance. The Tor network has built-in DDoS protection for onion hosts.
Indeed the ISP can only see where you go when using TLS, and that data can be aggregated to who you are along with everywhere else you go. It’s sensitive enough that in the US lawmakers decided on whether ISPs need consent to collect that info. Obama signed into force a requirement of ISPs to get consent. Then Trump reversed that. Biden did not reverse it back AFAIK.
W.r.t VPNs, you merely shift the surveillance point; you do not avoid the surveillance. The VPN provider can grab all that info just as well.
Privacy focused VPNs usually have tech to mitigate that like forgetting as soon as they have gone through the server for example, but I get that can be undone.
It’s worse than being reversible. The problem is that it’s unprovable. A switch from “zero logging” to “log everything” is wholly undetectible to users. You have to rely on blind faith that a profit-driven entity will act in your interest and resist their opportunity to profit from data collection. All you have is trust. Tor avoids that whole dicey mess and reliance on trust.