Tried looking for new instances to join and it's pretty harrowing. I think at least one is run like a cult
Oh it's even worse than I thought. Everything is set to "apply for an account" which impliesa bunch of hassle before you can actually do anything. Is this for safety or is it due to all the servers getting overloaded?
@mauve in my limited (and mostly indirect) experience it's not so much hassle, it only takes a tiny bit of patience. And I don't think that you in particular should have to worry about being accepted (except if, I don't know, you join the WeHateP2P.social instance :p). I think you identified both reasons. If I was running my own instance I would probably limit it to close friends I've known for a while, so I find it pretty brave of individuals to open up their instances to strangers. Hence I quite understand they have some basic check at the entrance ;)
@mauve Most will approve your application pretty quickly. It's less work to screen new users than let everyone in and then clean up their troll posts.