I’ve been using Tuta for more than 8 years now and had one serious issue with their service during this time (longer outage, pretty early on). Other than that I have nothing but positive experience with them.
They’re also based in Germany if that makes any difference.

I’d say no, for two simple reasons.

One: Websites should be made to the web standards and not for a specific piece of tech. Would you ask people to rework everything if Firefox magically became the “new Chrome” in a few years? Isn’t the main idea of this place to be better than the corporate dystopia we’re all trying to avoid?

Two: Fediverse IS NOT big enough to purposefully screw up people’s experience in an attempt to force them into changing their browsing habits. This would do more harm than good in the eyes of many potential users. Do you really think they would be willing to switch browsers they used for years just so they can check out a platform that’s smaller and with less content than its corporate counterparts?

Don’t punish - explain, convince and (if you have the know how) work on making a switch easier for an average user. That’ll not only be more productive but also bring more willing and potentially active participants.
That’s how I feel about it at least.

I can’t help with “now” but it definitely wasn’t locked the whole time. I used to have an account on Misskey.io without any issues or need for VPN (that was before they changed the registration rules though).

I realize that but even those daily updates don’t seem to catch everything. When I tried to bring some life to a community I was interested in it took a few weeks of activity before it showed up on the list. It’s a great tool but it’s not perfect.

Nice, didn’t know about this one.

Yeah, it can take a while before new communities show up. Not much can be done about it I’m afraid.

Are you looking specifically for a community for communities? If not there’s also Lemmy Explorer.

If you need other alternatives in the future Awesome Privacy repo has a pretty good list on various categories.

But WHAT is an alternative to that?

Cryptpad has forms. There’s also Framaforms though I can’t say how well it works or whether it would suit your needs.