Adoption is gonna be difficult. Many users don't care that much about privacy in general. So getting them to change their habits is a tall order. Furthermore, a lot of sites see TOR as suspicious and make the effort to block it/put them through captcha hell. I don't see a critical mass of users dropping convenience for the sake of something they don't really care about anytime soon.
There is a cultural factor also - Tor, like most American BigTech, tries to sell us the idea of "trust the network" over any government as "governments cannot be trusted". Yes, governments cannot be trusted but what is worse is if we lose faith in democracy and give in to the idea that some corporate overlord or a foreign network will do a better job of protecting our rights. It's a ridiculous idea that only Americans seem to buy, while the rest of the world are actually enforcing the protections of their rights through democratic means (demanding regulations and legislation).
Personally for me it is about the traffic that may be routed through my computer by the Tor network - I definitely do not want child porn, drugs or terrorist related site transactions packets to even touch my computer. It maybe a rare occurrence, but I want certainty. If we could control the traffic that is allowed on our network / computer, I'd be a more willing user of Tor. (A use case example would be to allow a Tor user to create a white list of onion sites from which they would be willing to accept traffic).
I agree. The certainty is reassuring. I also would never want my computer to touch even the most remotely objectionable material. I've contemplated running a Lemmy instance before, but the concerns you've brought forth are the main contributing factors in my decision to not do so.
Not only that, but TOR is something that becomes more private the more someone uses it. Iirc it's really easy to distinguish TOR packets from regular packets. Combine that with how few people use TOR, you're job of narrowing down who's abusing it becomes much easier.
Finally, just running an exit node opens one up to many legal liabilities. It's not something that's worth the effort, but it's strength comes from many people running one.
