TLAs, LEOs and criminals are both Tor end users and have an interest in attacking Tor users.
Everybody has the resources to run Tor relays and even exits, though the latter can become a massive legal nuisance. Servers are cheap. Read the Tor mailing list archives.
As to 'mostly used by hackers and pedos', please provide the evidence. Factual one, not non-sequiturs based on faulty assumptions.
I typically don't have the time to watch videos but I did in this case. It's not wrong. The question is: what is your threat model?
First, Tor is not designed to protect you from a global passive adversary nevermind an active one. Global network probes can be used to identify individual sessions by traffic timing correlations. Locating hidden services is quite easy that way, since they're sitting ducks. It is fairly easy to remotely compromise hidden service marketplaces for TLA players and/or use physical access to hardware and/or operators to make them cooperate with LEOs.
If you are trying to avoid ISP level snooping and blocking, advertisers, Google and national scale actors then Tor is the right tool to use. And by all means, do run your own relays to help the network. The more relays we have, the harder the attack.
I've been using it since the early days and ran relays and exits. It's good for anonymity against your ISP, advertisers and lesser adversaries than being targeted by TLAs. Can be a bit slow. Make sure to use encryption to protect against bad exit nodes.
VPN tunnels don't magically become transparent when packets pass UK fiber and routers. And legislation doesn't translate well into which software people are allowed to run, for endpoints in UK. They can try to become North Korea of course, good luck with that.
Your profile contains your post history to many of your communities.
I'm pointing out that if you're going to the trouble of hosting your own instance you could as well allow some convenient number of random users to register. It would erase most of your signal and help distribute the load and exposure to specific legal compartments.
Encrypted file systems requiring secrets at mount time can make seizing physical servers harder. It's more difficult with the cloud hosters, since these likely have an API for law enforcement.
For cars specifically you can attempt to keep pre-digital cars alive though hostile legislation will eventually make them illegal. But a better solution is to lobby for open source EVs.
Power meters for 15 EUR just have a display, no network. Tasmota plugs have a built-in webserver available on you WLAN and cost about 20-30 EUR. There are also devices from Shelly. If you want to collect your history, there are home automation tools like Home Assistant. You can use a VPN to your home network or push the results onto a world-visible webserver to access them remotely.
None of this involves Internet of Shit crapware, and random script kiddies remotely bricking your microinverter.
I presume federation does not propagate diagnostics available in the instance logs. We definitely need privacy-hardening docs for running Lemmy instances.
TLAs, LEOs and criminals are both Tor end users and have an interest in attacking Tor users.
Everybody has the resources to run Tor relays and even exits, though the latter can become a massive legal nuisance. Servers are cheap. Read the Tor mailing list archives.
As to 'mostly used by hackers and pedos', please provide the evidence. Factual one, not non-sequiturs based on faulty assumptions.