I'm gonna try posting publicly some and hope it's not a disaster. This platform looks like it has a lot of potential and I am eager to get off private, centralized services, but there's always the networking effect problem.

My account on Bird Website has been private literally forever. Keyword search bots and namesearch clowns are frightening and disgusting. I don't know if Masto will avoid that, but I'll be optimistic in the short term?

It worries me to join an instance without knowing what their moderation and longevity will look like in practice. Octodon looked promising. I hope it remains viable longterm.

I also worry about moderation scaleability with single-admin instances. Hopefully the ability to unilaterally close signups will help with that. Moderation is still a hard, labor-intensive problem.

Picking a site based on moderation policies: "Find something that's just restrictive enough to exclude anything you don't want to be exposed to, but just permissive enough to not boot you for anything you're likely to post."

A hard balance.