Oh hey, I actually looked into alternative keyboards on Android the other day. Stumbled on Unexpected Keyboard, where the “press and hold” alternative symbols are accessible by swiping in the direction of it from its key instead. I think because it’s FOSS, they’ve also added a whole bunch of other keyboard support such as ctrl and some unicode keys.
I’ve found that I prefer to tap and hold to get the alternative keys, but I loved the additional keys it had that were within easy visibility. Though it did look quite clustered that the default Samsung keyboard that I’m used to.
Good note on the instances removing kbin communities (is this defederation?), my instance in Sync for Lemmy is showing the links you shared as a website and not a normal federated community.