A potential downside is that anything you did on Reddit might be tied to anything you do here. Given enough posts you can eventually dox a person

Excellent point. Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, even email lists all solved this problem decades ago. And they mostly worked quite well. The web based generation was a step backwards in many ways.

Meh, beehaw seemed promising until they unilaterally decided to cut off large parts of lemmy. I get why, but I moved to another server because I want to control my own experience

I got root

for PCs you can just add a hosts file entry, but that’s probably not possible/too much work on phones. split horizon DNS is what you want.