I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can’t eat it.

Wikipedia has been running on donations for so many years. So I don’t think we are close to reaching that limit in any way

There is several of factors you should consider:

• Does it have a healthy amount of users: between 1k-10k users are probably the sweet spot right now. You don’t want too many users because it will cause performance problems. And instances with too few users has too many unknowns.

• read the rules see if you agree: servers can have wildy different rules ranging from no NSFW to no downvotes. If they don’t have any rules that is a red flag too. You want an active moderation so the instance doesn’t get run over by bots.

• Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.

That is probably all the basics

I got approved today 20 mins after verifying my email. It was a pleasant surprise

All the data comes from your own instance afaik. So pi-hole wouldn’t work

Currently only way to block a entire instance is defedarting in instance to instance Level. So you would either need to convince your instance admin to defederate or host your own. But I don’t see a reason why this wouldn’t be possible in future. It can even probably be implemented by a third party client without any changes to Lemmy api