While it’s a pretty good vpn all round that’s super easy to set and forget, I’ve been having issues the last ~6 months in Australia with the CIDR ranges getting blocked by Google, Reddit, and the like. It’s annoying to have it run fine for a few days, then suddenly have every second thing I do needing to solve a captcha for it.

Try the freemium tier for a while and see if it works for you - I may be wrong and you’ll run a whole month with nothing, but never hurts to verify.

Read up on your local laws, in Australia for example it’s required that 3 basic methods of cash, cheque, and bank transfer are accepted, may be something similar for you

It’s possible to track the number of hops that a device on a network has, since TTL will be 8-bit numbers (and ususally start at 64, 128, etc.) if the TTL of a packet has 64 from the main device, the devices it’s sharing with will be 63 (and so on un the chain for N+1 hops). This may not be exactly how they do it since device fingerprinting would be way simpler, but it is a plausible way of tracking that a device is using a hotspot.

While it likely is spam for the majority of users, I imagine the mods are looking at de-federating an instance that fulfills a specific need for a small number (keeping alien.top users updated on reddit). Because of that, it will likely have a bit of push back to de-federate entirely vs. a request to create the ability to block users/platforms. Think of it like newsletters, we need the ability to unsubscribe/block them, but we shouldn’t necessarily ban them outright.

I’d honestly say the confusion between what communities are worth subscribing to is one of the worst blocks for me. Sure, /c/ exists, but what server should I go to? What communities are there? What ones are actually active? It’s not as easy as reddit was, and if it’s annoyed me then it’s definitely stopped another 10 people from bothering with lemmy :/ Edit: also, ty for the suggestion