

Being limited isn’t that big a deal. My instance has them limited because of their lax moderation and an excess of reply guys. All it means is that I get a notification saying “Someone you might know sent you a notification” and I get to review and accept or deny the notification depending. Plus they have to request permission to follow me so I get to check them out before accepting.
I still have tons of mutuals on .social
and I get new ones all the time. While each person making the choice about whether to accept notifications or follows from a particular user is going to make their own choices, I don’t think it’s particularly inconvenient.
AfD sidebar
For their lack of adequate moderation capacity / interest, .social
has one topic they tend to over-react to. AfD sympathizing isn’t that one thing. Not to suggest they’re right here. I’d need the thread context and a better understanding of German to weigh in on that. Moderators are human and they’re going to make a bad call eventually. I’m not in a position to guess whether they made a bad call here. AfD aren’t just some normal political party, though.
I can’t say whether it can be cleanly migrated to another app but there are a number of export options to get you either to plain Markdown or something else within reason. When using the export option, the resulting Markdown at lest gives relative paths to any included media.
I don’t think it’s fair to suggest it’s not using Markdown. It just has a wrapper around it to make it work better for the usual use case of being a digital workbook.