There’s a local llama subreddit with a lot of good information and 4chan’s /g/ board will usually have a good thread with a ton of helpful links in the first post. Don’t think there’s anything on lemmy yet. You can run some good models on a decent home pc but training and fine tuning will likely require renting out some cloud gpus.
When you use a vpn, any traffic that would go between you and a website goes through the vpn first. Makes it hard for sites to know who you are and makes it hard for your isp to know what sites you visit.
When you use tor, any traffic that would go between you and a website is bounced around between a few different computers first. Similar to a vpn but is near impossible to track unless you’re a big gov agency with lots of resources.