If you're rich enough or travel enough (like politicians), you can just claim that you will "be out of the county on election day and during the period for early voting by personal appearance".
https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/voter/reqabbm.shtml
These laws are meant to impact the poor and the middle class.
I'm in the same boat. Having a small instance for me and my friends might create an echo chamber, at least initially. My current strategy is to browse all on kbin and sdf's Lemmy and find interesting communities to subscribe to.
This does cause an issue of duplicate communities though -- pawb.social has tech but so do other Lemmy instances. I have not found a good way to group them and de-dup them yet.
Thanks for all the great memories and moments RIF. We will miss you!