Tor uses a networking protocol developed by the US government. When you access a webpage, your computer talks to the website's server to request and send information. The server sees an address for you computer (your IP address) and your computer sees the server's. It's how they find each other. Chapo.chat is just a text facade for humans to read. The real address is numbers. Your computer doesn't talk directly to the server, it leaves your house, goes to a box, and that box is connected to your ISP's network. It may then go to a local hub that then lets it onto the internet at large. It might even bounce between a couple of servers along the way to the destination.

What Tor does is it bounces your traffic between even more servers. So instead of chapo.chat seeing a connection coming from California, it sees something coming from Sweden. And the bounces are arranged as such it's hard to trace to where the source came from. But that's just part of it. The next part is encryption. Your traffic is inside layers of encryption between servers (nodes) along the way to the destination. So at any given time there's at least a few layers of encryption. The only time the data isn't anonymous when it's decrypted at the end, at the exit node.

This isn't a perfect system. Using tor alone will not completely protect you. You need to use tor along with other things like the right browser setup. If you go to tor's website, you download tor browser. This comes set up for you to use. It comes with the requisite plugins. It's open source. It's a simple as downloading it and opening the browser. You'll be automatically connected to the tor network.

The hard part is figuring out the websites because they all don't have readable addresses. you'll get something like woihalskdghlkcpipozz.onion. There are indexing services (sort of like google) that make a searchable list of tor sites. You'll just have to look that up on the regular internet. It's not something I have handy or memorized.

Other than that it's pretty fucking boring tbh. The core and most active sites is just edgy or goofy stuff like hackerspaces and subversive libraries of ebooks you can get on the regular internet. There are some dark markets but they're probably honeypots or scams to steal your cryptocurrency. People expect it to be like walking down a shady alley at night with the wrong element lurking about. But it's really like browsing the internet in 1996. Just some novelty shit that you look at for 20 mins and then get bored.