If you try to use tor with the appimage with tor it just constantly loads without doing anything. Just a guess but maybe appimage is blocking the connection? If I clone the repo and use npm start tor works as intended. BTW the distro Fedora 28. I haven't tried to replicate the issue on other distros.
I was able to reproduce the issue. I will take a look and see what I can do. I'll update here if I figure anything out.
This has been fixed and will be included in the next release.