I run a PiHole and have Quad9 as the upstream resolver instead of the ISP. That was pretty simple to setup as well. You can also do DNS-over-HTTPs and other options as well for content filtering to block malware and items of DNS upstream.
What is hard too, is if all the posts to get things started are the mods or creator, the same ghost town might occur. It’s hard to tell or know what will be interesting to get people talking so to speak. Some should also be put on the subscribers as well who also have an interest. It’s a double edge sword sometimes.
I wish one account on the fediverse was more easily used across platforms: mastodon, peertube and kbin for example. I can follow kbin on mastodon but came enjoy the thread experience of kbin. Still getting used to each platform as well as they each offer a unique experience of their own.
Changing ports isn’t a terrible thing, also not the perfect “fix” either, as you can still recognize open ports and scan the service on them.
Some ports are reserved in networking, so should stay away from those.
Some ISPs don’t allow you open ports on 80/443 as those are web hosting ports and they provide a service to consumers to download content from the internet, not for their consumer to be a web hosting provider as well. That’s at the residential level, if you have a business plan that might change, but it might be hard to convince and ISP otherwise.