This one point about the fediverse that I find essential to consider when thinking about reliability. Distributed ownership of servers drastically decreases the chances of the fediverse as a whole going down (not considering differences in the reliability of individual servers). But each individual server has a much higher chance of going down than say an individual subreddit. This is a subject I’d very much like to understand better, but it’s clear it has implications to the chance of any given post getting lost.
I started following people I found elsewhere, then followed people they boosted until my feed had enough volume. Since I mostly consume content and don’t post much, that has been working for me. It does take some figuring out and blocking people (like some on this thread) who’ll act like you’re not supposed to be there if it isn’t all obvious to you (it really isn’t to anyone). If you like both lemmy and twitter (X) it might be worth giving masto another shot.