I use all three: mastodon, bluesky, and twitter. Mostly because people I follow are on different platforms. Personally, I would settle for mastodon alone.

Yep, maybe it would benefit from more advertisement but I decided to not recommend it until I experience it for some time. It took me a week or two to realize that I don’t like moderation at lemmy-world for example, I would definitely recommend choosing other instances, and then, it takes time to figure out which ones are worth recommending. Some are extremist far-left/far-right, some are at risk of shutting down if admin gets bored and decides to stop paying for hosting from his personal money.

Not much you can do other than researching the current consensus. And for the latter you can try to search discussions about its safety. Good query to start with is “is programname malware/spyware”.

I’m pretty much happy with conversations I see here. Plenty of quality discussion threads in AskLemmy, Gaming and Technology and Anime. Would be nice to see even more ofc, but Lemmy’s not that big yet I guess. Questions is something that often starts interesting discussions.

I look almost the same as I did when I was twice as young as I am right now and I understand that during this decade I’ll probably leave the age bracket where this is possible.

I like decentralized approach and modlog feature. Really nice to be able to monitor moderation and see reasons for certain actions. This helps a lot to understand what to expect from certain instances, make the best choices for yourself and avoid frustration in future.