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.