I believe there are a large number of feature requests on Lemmy’s GitHub page, making it difficult for developers to prioritize what’s truly important to users.
Github issues are annoying that way. You could solve it by closing down "issues" and using discussions instead. People can up and downvote discussions, and you can see that from the listview, unlike with issues.
And you can have threaded conversations in discussions.
How about figure out what you can and can't access first. Like can you access the rest of the internet openly?
Are all sites allowed, are some things blacklisted, or are sites whitelisted? If things are whitelisted on the network, it might be pretty difficult to find a hole.
Anyways, you mentioned your phone - If you have unlimited data, I'd suggest you just set up your phone for tethering, and create a private wifi from your laptop to your phone using mobile data, that should bypass all network restrictions.