I have not, I will give it a look - thank you!

Agree. I had to do some reading to fully understand the fediverse. If there was a portal that just assigned users to a random instance and then put them directly into a community database for them to sub across multiple instances it would be a much easier on boarding.

servers being overloaded right now, it will smooth out

There is a list of 300+ subs that are staying dark indefinitely. Some have tens of millions of subs. I expect that list will grow as more of this stuff comes out.