I have considered running a relay node but I'm not even sure how safe that is.
https://nos-oignons.net/%C3%80_propos/index.en.html
It collects donations and pays for hosting of ToR exit nodes in various ISP, mostly not-for-profit too:
https://nos-oignons.net/Services/index.fr.html
It's now about 0.6% exit probably through their node.
Outside of managing donation money and the technical platform their main task is to answer judiciary requests.
Detailed activity report (in French):
https://nos-oignons.net/Association/
Disclaimer: I'm a volunteer for one of the nor-for-profit hoster for Nos Oignons.
For Exit nodes it's more complicated. You should read at least [0][1][2] before thinking about running one.
[0]: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/t...
[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/tips-running-exit-node
[2]: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/e...
As long as you are using tls and avoiding packet injection there's little difference. I'm sure plenty of governments own exit nodes themselves. Good on them for contributing to the network.
However the comment you're replying to talks about exit nodes, these are potentially obnoxious for your neighbours, as from them of course emerges traffic that somebody else didn't want to admit to sending.
Now, perhaps it's a young gay guy in a country where homosexuality is illegal, reading an essay by someone who has been in a similar situation.
Or a fourteen year old looking at pornography bypassing a "family filter"
But more likely it's vandals trying to replace every mention of a pop star they don't like on Wikipedia with the words "Jerk Poop-head", a spammer sending piles of unsolicited commercial email, or a botnet operator trying to send C&C packets to direct a DDoS.
For this you will of course get blocked by various services, and explaining it isn't actually you might prevent getting arrested in many jurisdictions, but won't mean everybody lets you use their services from this obviously tainted connection.
So, doing that on your personal ISP connection is probably a bad idea.
Running any node strengthens the TOR network as it provides more anonymous paths for users to connect through. Since running a middle node from home doesn't cause any issues for you, doing so is a great way to contribute to the network.
If you have a machine that's always on, has slightly higher specs, and you have slightly higher network speeds too, you might consider running an entry node instead.
https://support.torproject.org/operators/limit-total-bandwid...
For the first few years I've been a regular visitor to the local police (my ISP Hetzner at that time gave my name and address out), but eventually Hetzner banned me for generating too many abuse-tickets for them, which is unfortunate but clearly understandable.
I moved all the servers to a colocated rack in a datacenter in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and haven't had a problem since. But I guess that's only possible because I'm able to deal with the abuse messages directly now.
That said, the servers are handling a few terabytes per day each but I still have only received two abuse messages in the last 2 years. I don't know if that's related to the fact that people complain less now than they did in 2015 and 2016, or that the exit nodes now clearly indicate they are exit nodes (when opening their IP or hostname with a browser).
This 2015 Vice article attempts to answer that question: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5394ax/the-operators
TL;DR: "most of these exits are set up by volunteers, or 'operators.' A few organizations maintain the larger exits, a number of universities have their own, and individual activists run some too."
That was 10 years ago, I've run both exits and relays since then.