that's honestly one of the most incredible things about the fediverse to me, that it's small enough that there's just no barriers for that sort of thing, when i can't see that happening the same way on any of the centralized silos I've been on in the past
i understand leaving a backup account there because it's one of the least likely to go down english-speaking instances on the fediverse, but mastsoc is harmful to federation
ideally, host your own instance, or get together some of your friends (and hopefully at least one sysadmin) and host one together for the lot of you, where all of you chip in. My instance costs $5 a month
as a backup, join the instance of someone you personally trust, imo if you can't form a personal relationship with the admin within reason, the instance is too big
also, pleroma is good damn software and it's getting better by the day, if you just want a closed instance for you and your friends, i highly recommend it, although open instances can be problematic because of it having weaker moderation tools than mastodon
it's worth noting fontina is on hiatus at the moment while I'm working on Pubstomp, a generic AP backend server that fontina is going to be built on top of down the line that uses golang and dgraph as a DB