Yeah, /r/AnarchyChess wouldn't be anywhere close to where it is now if memes were allowed on /r/chess. Splitting the memes and discussion apart is definitely the best way to go.
Thassar
I haven't researched it at all but I'd be very surprised if you needed anything more than a domain name (basically free as long as you don't go for a common TLD) and somewhere to host it (literally free if you do it on a home PC but that comes with other issues). Cloudflare and extra security are nice but aren't necessary for something like this.
Multi-threaded programming is hard. You can't just write some code and expect it to work across 4 cores, you need to know what to parallelise and how to do it. If you think normal bugs are hard to fix, just wait until you have a calculation that gives a different answer each time you run it thanks to race conditions.
That's good. It's always annoying to see "Hey, there's content here but you're not allowed to see it" on sites like this.
Hmm, what happens to the comments in your third situation? Do Beehaw users see some kind of "Cannot display this message" error on LW comments but can still read replies to it made by other users or does the entire comment chain just disappear?
Have you given apps like wefwef.app a go? That might fix your UI issues.