Charging for their api is reasonable in answer to the llm data scrapers. The amount they're chsrging, and the speed of the changes is not reasonable however IMO.
Its a reasonable analogy, but were not there yet. While mastodon instances will talk to mastodon instances, and pixelfed instances will talk to pixelfed instances, and kbin instances will talk to kbin instances, at the moment the intercommunication between apps is a real issue. Imagine postfix wouldn't reliably talk to exchange servers, that would be a real barrier to adoption. I'm hopeful this will get sorted, but were on the bleeding edge at the moment.
An option which covers a bunch of different experiments: set up PiHole on it (despite the name, it doesn't need to be run on a raspberry pi) then set up a persistent VPN, for eg wireguard, or whatever your router supports, to it from where you are, and then setup your router to use it as your DNS server for your vlan.
Its a relatively simple set of tasks, but they build a good grounding for anything else you end up wanting to run on it.