Posted this on r/darknetmarketsnoobs and the only response was this:
I am not expert ether i know good but onions links is like real onion
Anyway, here's my question. As far as anonymity and opsec are concerned, what is the difference between using TAILS/ Tor to browse clearnet sites and using it to browse onion sites? What is the main difference between .onion addresses and normal websites?
That's a beautiful answer which can never be topped. Congrats on receiving a top answer.
But I will attempt to come second to that golden one. Onion sites are are routed through the Tor network. Clearnet sites are routed through normal network where the data flows through a normal clearnet route. The Onion site's webserver is configured in a way that any incoming traffic goes through Tor and then to the webservers local installation.
In short Tor will listen to the standard Http port you have configured and then proxy back to the nginx instance on the local host where the web server is configured on. This goes out through that route again. Someone from Clearnet wouldn't be able to open the web page because that data will flow through the Tor package and Tor service will discard any clearnet connection. So the web server will never listen to the incoming connection from clearnet. But someone using Tor will get through because Tor will accept those incoming connections.
Privacy wise, Onion sites are hidden because of this. Someone hosting dank stuff on clearnet can be tracked and anyone opening that dank page on clearnet can be tracked back. Onion hosting ensures that the both the dank site owner and the frontend user are hidden because of the Tor service.
Thanks.