Ultimately does it matter? They can say they do or don’t track you and they can say your data and privacy is safe but you never have a guarantee. It’s no different from when companies promise us xyz but then in the background they’ve been doing shady shit. My best suggestion is to try to make the best educated choice and to accept you made the best choice you could with the information you had at the time.

Never put anything on the internet you don’t want out there forever, even if you were able to delete your comments from your instance and the federated instances there are most certainly people from /r/datahoarders making archives of posts and comments in the fediverse

Oof best of luck to you guys on .ml instances, might be worth looking at buying a domain as a backup to migrate to. Don’t wanna be caught off guard like this especially if they are trying to recoup all their urls. I went with a .boo domain to be unique for my instance but there are loads of TLDs out there

Mlem beta test is full right now unfortunately

This is an issue I’ve had with many social media sites, it can be really difficult to find content that is interesting to you. Sure the bigger sites will have some sort of recommendation algorithm but that breaks down at two places. The first, if you don’t follow or engage with enough content it doesn’t know what to recommend you (but how do you find content to follow and engage with if you are are new). The second, you start to notice a pattern with the recommendations especially on something like YouTube. I get recommended the same like 20-40 videos even when I mark “not interested.”