It's been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out

This is incredibly pathetic. Why the asshats running reddit want to kill it this hard before an IPO is beyond me

I can maybe think of the thought process of people so far removed from how people use reddit trying to squeeze as much money out of it but killing it in the process, but it feels so dumb that I'm not sure I'm convinced

No, it's rather unlikely. Especially if you use some DNS service that blocks some ICANN WHOIS lookups (usually gives out information that you enter when registering the domain name), you'll be fine.

Domains can be cheap, but will need to be renewed. A VPS for hosting can be cheap or expensive, but running it on an older computer would be a good bet.

The benefit of a VPS is that you don't need to worry about using your own IP address.

It's inherent to the architecture of the system; you can spin your own instance and not have to worry. People can still block you however.

It's different than traditional social media, and for people looking for something identical to that but open are going to be hard pressed to have something usable.

The technical aspect of spinning your own server will be prohibitive to a lot of people unfortunately, but there is some documnetation online for that

Same thing happened with mastodon and I'm pretty sure it stifled it's further growth