Short answer: no.

I don't mean to be rude. The desire to use VPNs is completely understandable. Unfortunately, VPNs were being abused in ways that were detrimental to the community here. Last year there were several waves of really grotesque troll posts (CSAM, scat porn, etc.) on lemmy.world and other instances. Blocking VPNs was one of the responses that was effective in stopping those posts. The admin team has no interest in backtracking at this time.

You have moderation here

We have unpaid volunteers donating their spare time. Nobody wants to spend their lunch break purging CSAM posts from some troll. And no users want a post to stay up for hours because the mods were asleep, at work, or otherwise not watching the Lemmy feed. (That actually happened, and is what drove me to donate some of my time here.) If law enforcement ever does come knocking, this instance doesn't have the money or time to mount a defense.

I wish things were different. This is the unfortunate reality that this particular instance has faced. Other instances may feel differently.

I’m also using paid Proton VPN and have issues posting comments every day. If I stick to non-American servers things generally work, but if my random connection picks anywhere in the US, my comments won’t post until I switch and switch and switch and find a random server that works. I’ve rage-deleted quite a few comments after they refuse to post. It’s really pretty frustrating, but I won’t stop using my VPN to make Lemmy work better.

I'm all for the use of vpns but why do you call it basic internet hygiene? Your traffic will just have a different egress point on the Internet, it doesn't really provide any additional security unless you are using it to access private networks.

Host your own and accept the liability of what users post on vpns yourself and then you can use any VPN you want. Until then, admins like me are on the hook for whatever crazy stuff our users post, and I really don't like feds busting down my door

I'm on Proton (US server IL#263 atm but regularly use others) and haven't had any problems.