/r/whowouldwin :(

Also /r/tiktokcringe, so many of the videos there had me nearly in tears in laughter

That's helpful to think of it that way, thank you. Perhaps I will reconsider :)

I'm interested in getting into this, but I think I'd probably end up abandoning it and having it feel like a chore, then feel guilty about not getting it 'done.'

I know this opinion is wildly unpopular, but I think pirating is unethical. If you can’t afford something, or you disagree with spending money for it, then fine. Don’t watch that show/listen to that song/play that game. But the people who make things deserve to get paid. It’s not right to refuse to pay for something while also consuming that content. Many of the justifications for pirating just feel like entitlement to me.

I like that Lemmy and Masto don’t have those fucking algorithms. It’s a relief.

I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:

The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.

It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.

All we can do is try to make the best of it.

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

spy on all the traffic

That's...not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won't attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you're going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you're going to fail when load starts to really increase.