Same here. I had no idea what picking an insurance meant in terms of the amount of people, communities, level of engagement, etc.

I could have picked one of the more toxic communities that have been defederated and my experience of lemmy would have been much worse

Yeah decision paralysis definitely delayed my joining any ActivityPub based sites, but really most of what it affects is stuff that wont matter until you've spent enough time on the platform to understand the difference to begin with