I feel you, I’ve been super active in a niche community of a game ( /r/ADCmains from League), and even though it was a salty shitshow, I enjoyed it there.

I got some of that fixed by joining a discord, but it’s not the same :/

I think so. That, as well as putting /home on a different partition in order to just replace the OS but not lose data

So the only thing helping would be VPN + DNS change… not too easy, but not too hard either to be honest, but it will probably exclude a lot of people from access