BermudaHighball

Good question. It's not quite the same.

The most compelling reason is that browsing an onion service does not leak any information about the destination to an exit relay because the connection goes directly to the destination service. Connecting via an onion service makes timing correlation attacks much harder to carry out to deanonymize users since there is no exit relay to record when connections to lemmy.dbzer0.com are made. Posts and the timestamps associated with them on a public social network make timing correlation attacks even easier to perform, since there is evidence on which to validate the results.

It also acts as an advertisement about the site's commitment to anonymity and privacy.

Use Tor Browser if you need anonymity, which isn't offered by private browsing mode or most other extensions. In case you don't want to route through the Tor network, Mullvad Browser offers the same fingerprinting resistance techniques as Tor Browser.

Proton is a good service, but their years of reluctance to include more anonymous payment methods such as Monero and the inability to register an account from an anonymous IP address without a phone number makes me question the relative benefit of using them as a VPN.

These do not by themselves result in a compromise of anonymity if Proton is trustworthy and the Swiss laws still enable them to disassociate your identity (given via payments) and your account usage, but regulation and governments tend to become stricter rather than looser over time and I would demand more from a service you are entrusting with all your internet traffic.

If you want to learn Python, the tutorial in the documentation is a thoroughly excellent starting point. Reading the documentation (the most up-to-date, deliberate content) will make you far more of a Python wizard than codecademy ever could.

There is a group trying to copy it at therarbg.com. Standards are not as high as rarbg as it appears and content is still being imported, but the interface is familiar.

You can also try bitsearch.to, which is just a general torrent indexer for torrents.

Neither is as complete as rarbg was. Ideally therarbg and others will come to fill its place.

onion site is down too