I mean, if you’re doing to do illegal shit (eg journalism), it is best done on a VPS. This is what basically every military and cyber mercenary orgs do.
Just make sure you only log into the box over Tor, and configure it to only pass data out over Tor. Use it as a jump box. Even if they compromise it, it should tell them nothing about you useful for attribution
Mods should be banning people who downvote content that is well-cited and high effort
I haven’t even seen an instance with a sidebar that explains what the downvote button is for.
It has gotten much worse in the past year, but I blame the instance admins and mods for not even trying to educate their users