On principle, you have a social network that cannot technically be shutdown. That's great!
But also on practice, starting up your own instance means being that lone wolf, and shouting into the void. If you're not part of Vivaldi DOT Social, for example, and you visit my profile, and you're not yet following me, odds are not all my post show up. Now imagine that on instance, that is all alone in the void with few users.
Issues ranged from software, yes, obviously that was 1st.
But issues also range from admins who should never have been admins. The type of admins who ran old community forums and who are drama queens and who freedom of speech is whatever they agree with (cannot say, for example, you dislike both Donald Trump and Joe Biden).
I like the software, Sharkey, but I do find the general use in practice to be discouraging.
A personal observation that I dislike is it seems many of the Sharkey instances experience issues.
It is a shame, because I do like Sharkey. But one of the reasons I kept hopping from one instance to another instance is I would join these so-called well-known instances, only for them to have some issues.
Mastodon is "OK". I dislike that you cannot move your post with Mastodon. I have a backup of all my content on my local PC which I can port into any Sharkey instance, but Mastodon moving means starting over.