Glad to hear! You’re welcome!

Going by your figure, a few dozen users out of nearly 2,500 combined monthly active users behaved badly. It seems to me that defederating was/is an overreaction when user-level blocks and community-level bans exist.

In case you’re not aware, lemmy.world has (pre-emptively) defederated from the two instances that have the vast majority of socialists and communists on Lemmy, hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.

If you want a lot more socialists to read your question and provide more informative answers, you may want to post in a community on lemmy.ml or lemmy.zip, which don’t defederate those instances.

People will downvote my message and complain that hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are “tankie” instances, which I interpret to mean that they hate people who want to make socialism happen in real life some day.

I also use an email alias service and have dealt with this a handful of times. Here’s how I’ve been able to address most of them, in order of what I tried which worked, meaning that items lower on the list were more rarely required but also more likely to work than items higher on the list:

1. Instead of using the free-tier alias domain names (like freealiasservice.com), I used the paid-tier ones (like paidaliasservice.com).
2. Instead of the common domain names shared by everyone (like aliasservice.com), I used a custom subdomain, (like cricket.aliasservice.com).
3. Instead of either of the above, I used a custom domain name.

So the above is the answer to your first question. The answer to your second is that in my experience the majority of sites that block certain email domains are using a deny-list instead of an allow-list. The answer to your third is that custom domains should work for the vast majority of sites. I think it would be silly for sites to use allow-lists for this, but I’ve heard of some doing it.

One other thing to keep in mind about my list is that it’s also more or less in order of most private/anonymous to least private/anonymous. Item 1 hides you in the crowd, while 2 and 3 can be more easy to associate with you if you have enough of them for someone interested in finding this out to do some matching to determine if you use services a, b, and c, for example.

I hope this helps.

For the cameras themselves, if you would be interested in DIY solutions and have some old spare Raspberry Pis around, you can turn them into streaming IP cameras and have some control over what camera specs and lenses you use. I can’t tell you how they compare to purpose-built cameras though.