Yeah, I do agree Beehaw won’t be able to grow significantly if they keep doing things the way they’re doing them right now. At present point, they’re going to likely remain a more niche community long-term with how they’re operating. Who knows though, maybe this is what they want. Lemmy would have to do something different though without a herculean moderation effort.
I reckon it’d depend significantly on the instance. Beehaw has a signup form reviewed by humans - measures like this are by no means perfect, but coupled with other bot detection software could help. If an instance developed a real issue with bots, other more strict instances could potentially ban up votes and comments from accounts on it.
At the very least, tracking instances that account interaction came from should be quite doable, so users part of more strict instances could filter out upvotes and comments from less strict instances if desired.
I bet you could do it if your instance didn’t pull in a lot of traffic.
If it did… I reckon that you might be able to pull it off to a certain extent so long as your internet package was good enough, but if you got hit with a Reddit-level flood of incoming users, your network almost certainly wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Even if it could, if you were consistently eating through all the upload bandwidth, I reckon you’d draw the eyes of your ISP and they might send you a letter kindly and respectfully telling you that if you don’t upgrade to a commercial line they’re not renewing your contract.
It probably is that popular among this crowd. There’s options to self-host your own Bitwarden instance IIRC.
I’ve started migrating away from LastPass and am using Bitwarden for new projects personally. LastPass is way better than nothing, but I wouldn’t recommend LastPass over Bitwarden these days.