I think it would actually be a better user default to be included in the most popular communities so they see a lot of posts. Otherwise if you subscribe to a instance with not many of their own communities, you will think there is nothing going on.
I was thinking to write a guide for this. Users need to go to search, pick All instances and then search on something. But that’s not easy to know on day one.
If you want to, sure. I haven’t used Google for many years but others seem happy to continue using them.
I think a lot of people have given up on privacy but it’s not too hard these days to get some. You just can’t get perfect privacy. Then you can’t even own a phone or have a credit card.