Yeah people are not going to migrate over if they hear they can't interact with everyone. "Be careful which instance you sign up with because other instances may have blacklisted you, but I can't tell you which home instance to use because it might get overloaded."
That would be great, but upvoting is what people are used to and I think it would urge people to participate, especially while we're in this transition period.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that's what keeps the lights on then I'll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I'm skeptical that will work.
I wish, but I've seen a bunch of redditors in the last few days say they didn't even know 3rd party apps existed. Even complaining about the blackouts how all it's doing is hurting the users. Idk if those are bots, paid comments, or what, but I'm sure a lot of people actually think that and it's sooo frustrating.