The easiest way that doesn’t affect the main network would be to use a travel router. Its WAN IP would be the private IP it gets from the main network (over wireless since that’s your only option). And it would NAT your network onto that IP and then you can do whatever you want on your network.
I’m not sure if that Mikrotik router will do this but it might. You basically need something that can connect to an SSID and use that interface as its WAN interface. The wireless factor here is really limiting your choices. If you had a wired uplink to the main network you could use any router/gateway/firewall you wanted. You could also use an AP in bridge mode to connect to the main network’s SSID and wire it to the WAN port of any router of your choice.
You don’t really need to use VLANs to separate your network from the main network unless you want to share any of the same layer 2 segments (basically wired Ethernet) while keeping it isolated. But it doesn’t really sound like that applies in your scenario. Of course using VLANs within your network would still make sense if that applies (for example, to separate your server traffic from your IoT traffic).
Yep this is exactly right. Too many people are unaware that their votes are not anonymous on Lemmy and blocking the public tool only helps the bad guys who already know this. I’ve always thought this was a major weakness in Lemmy but I don’t have a solution myself without some other major drawback.
I think probably votes should be anonymized or batched between servers so that only your instance’s admins can see individual votes and you just have to trust the instances you federate with that they aren’t pulling any shenanigans or otherwise defederate. That’s not an easy problem to solve, but it’s not like it’s not currently possible to manipulate votes with a federated server, it would just be harder to detect. Regardless I think the need for privacy wins here.