agree. You start thinking what if the one you randomly chose is the problematic one, what if they don’t follow best/good privacy/security practices, what if they are not an active collective/person and they forget updating their instance etc. Then you start thinking again: ok I’ll go to the “main”, default one, it must be a safe choice, you go there and you see that the main one has closed the registrations and you are still in the same position.
i think there is a way to move your account from one instance to another, but even if there is a way, it wouldn’t cover the case that an instance is already offline. Yes, generally speaking it is nice and correct approach to “choose a smaller instance”, but when you don’t know who runs it behind, it is actually other problems that come up, as you already know first hand.