I don’t recommend LW, it’s full of Redditeurs and defederated from instances I like such as hexbear and lemmygrad. But I did start there, because that was the one recommended to me.

But that didn’t stop me from migration when the admins of that server started making choices I didn’t like. That’s what federation is good for, and looking back my experience is now better than before.

Let people join bad instances and then figure out federation later. Getting that foot in the door is what matters most.