Yeah, finding the right instance can be tricky. If you want some more anonomity so you easily blend into the crowd then a general instance might offer that, but then the general community there can have problematic topics and comments trending locally that might brother you enough to want to move if you don’t like the general users.
But, then if you go with a niche instance that is immediately identifiable as holding certain values then it can be harder to blend in and instantly stand out from other comments if the instance exists for a specific topic as its image.
With your doxxing issues. I’m not sure the extent of private information was leaked, but it is best to see what information shared could have led to the doxxing being possible. Finding what led to that can help to try and reduce risks online, since any publicly viewable social media can’t offer protection. Only thing that can be done on public social media is to try to not share too much identifiable info or change details to try and reduce risk while retaining the core idea of the message.
I went with lemmy.one because of privacyguides from reddit, and I liked that the move of actually being serious about the protest by making an alternative to move away from. Very few of the subreddits I subscribed to ever decided to make an instance or a fediverse community, so lemmy.one was what I defaulted to in the beginning. Since then Android has made an instance too, so that’d be my second choice. Anyways, that’s how I decided by going with what I was familiar with.
Threads seems worse to me because it is Meta, requires an app, and can’t be look at without an account. At least Twitter has restored visibility to people without accounts and now Twitter front ends are working again. Everything in meta has seemed to be account based with Instagram and Facebook where if someone sends me a links is usually useless since it requires a login. And I’m not creating a meta account. Even tiktok can be viewed without an accoubt or app.
I definitely do not wish to see a push towards content that is created for the purposes of trying to monetize or self promote for the purposes of making money. The shilling is the worst part of lot of plarforms because of corporate interests that need to recoup costs or want to have a successful IPO so leads to inevitable ways to monetize users and monetizing users.
Leave the popular crowd drawing shills on the corporate platforms. While it would be nice for the fediverse to have more niche thriving communities if it means becoming filled with shills then at that point why even bother with the fediverse.