Maybe, and I realise this sounds borderline crazy, but hear me out.
Maybe we shouldn't be running TOR exit nodes personally. It seems to me a couple of people should form a nonprofit company to run the node and distance themselves from liability that way. You'll still need to shut it down if your company is found guilty of running a server that was used to distribute bad bits, but it would be more "we wanted to make something nice and these gosh darned paedophiles got in our way and we can't continue" and less "you collude with paedophiles and are a paedophile and a criminal". It will be harder and it will take more funds and perhaps it's borderline impossible, but this is where things seem to be going. Be a corporation, because individual people get squashed like bugs.
Unfortunately, setting up a limited liability corporation tend to require substantial funding up front, I believe several months worth of median income in many places.
I'm afraid your advice actually reduces to "be rich, because poor people get squashed like bugs". (Of course, another possibility is to rally many people to your cause. Then you can fund your expensive legal structure with poor people.)
Hmm, that varies from place to place, but yes - not cheap. Aren't there also different fees depending on whether it's for-profit or not?
Obviously you'd set it up with more people, there obviously are enough who want to contribute to Tor. You'd gather capital, sign some up as co-founders and use what you can to buy colocation and set up servers. I wonder if you could also switch things around and colocate in people's homes by renting the property and paying for a residential connection, then renting it back to whoever lived there originally at the original fee. Basically, you create a company, have it rent an apartment and pay for a connection, then you rent the apartment and connection from the company, which should end up with you (legally) having (nearly) nothing at all to do with the black box in the corner that connects to the internet.
Maybe we shouldn't be running TOR exit nodes personally. It seems to me a couple of people should form a nonprofit company to run the node and distance themselves from liability that way. You'll still need to shut it down if your company is found guilty of running a server that was used to distribute bad bits, but it would be more "we wanted to make something nice and these gosh darned paedophiles got in our way and we can't continue" and less "you collude with paedophiles and are a paedophile and a criminal". It will be harder and it will take more funds and perhaps it's borderline impossible, but this is where things seem to be going. Be a corporation, because individual people get squashed like bugs.