Hi JB, I went down this rabbit hole last week, here is a post I made summarizing what I found, with links to the dev’s GH discussions of the different ideas for implementing the linking of communities, both within an instance or across instances, public or private, mod or user created. These features would likely be implemented separately.
There is also a link to a firefox extension that you may find useful while the dev work is ongoing.
Not at all: Not if you avoid purchasing anything involving tipped-services! People who pay their workers so little that they need to be tipped tend not to get my business.
also check out https://www.allsides.com/, which has a somewhat similar concept