I absolutely understand. I used to run a Mastodon server, and stopped when it no longer interested me. I never really used twitter anyway whereas I am on reddit most every day, so I am expecting this to hold my interest/attention longer. I run a number of services for myself already (git, password manager, media hosting, authentication, etc) so the burden of one more thing in my homelab is minimal vs someone who isn't doing that sort of thing.

Overall, some manner of truly federated and distributed user identity is something the current fediverse seems to be lacking. Nobody has really adopted DID yet and most of its registries still rely on some sort of central authority for identity regardless.

Yeah the people that say "what instance you join doesn't really matter aside from your local page" when it does. It might be easier to get into an instance with only one other person, but that doesn't mean that instance will continue to exist a year from now or even tomorrow.