Is browsing the dark web or deep web illegal?

No. Go for it.

Not in general, but I have a feeling that whatever you'd be up to is.

Depends what you're looking at.

Does anyone have experience using Silk Road? I've been thinking about getting on but don't know anything about it. Stories, tips, or tricks?

>>1
define darkweb

how do you find sites?

i was thinking about setting up a tor node on a VPS, running it for a while to get the HSDir flag, then modifying the code to spit out all the hidden services that it knows about.

i can never find any cool tor sites, everything listed on hiddenwiki is crap/down/not relevant to my interests.