Only new Reddit employs the VPN block. If you visit old.reddit.com, you can use the page without being locked out.

Is this what you are looking for? A friend of mine sent me this screenshot, unfortunately I don’t have the source for it.

This is in South Tyrol in Italy :)

Surely I can do that, but I was still mildly infuriated.

That pun was truly peak performance.

I use FairEmail. The free version already has fairly advanced features, it’s open source and ad free, and you can customize it to your liking. Even the paid version is not a ripoff and feels like you are actually supporting the developer instead of throwing money at a greedy company.