I feel like it’s a balancing act and you can’t make everyone happy. I, personally, don’t hang around unmoderated communities because they are often worse: hostile, full of spam and questionable content… so basically /b/. But even 4chan is moderated to an extent shrug

You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DMCA).

This is the way to go. I also run sshguard on all publicly-accessible hosts just to reduce traffic from bots, otherwise I just ssh over tailscale.

Similar service, just with more built-in features than pihole, namely supporting DoH/DoT.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki/Comparison