> you have to make this massive decision with no real information to base the decision off of: namely which server to use.

I think people exaggerate how massive a decision this is. When the news that Twitter might be bought by a naughty melon broke, I revived an old mastodon.online account that I'd created back during a _previous_ Twitter scandal, used that for a bit, then moved to mastodon.ie. Moving is, generally, reasonably easy. Now there are edge-cases; your instance might just _go away_, say. But generally you can't go too far wrong by initially selecting one of the big ones and then moving as and when.