I want to point out the obvious choice by recommending Minecraft. It is very easy to proficient, acquiring in game materials is all you do. Play sessions can be as long as you want since it is a open sandbox and you can add as much depth as you want via mods.
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
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
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