I did it because it is cheaper, lets me learn a bit about self hosting and causes me to have less captchas and less websites blocking me, and its also more resistant to any potential VPN bans (my country's already made social media have age verification, I'm sure they'll come for vpns eventually). You're right that I don't have the benefit of blending in but there's still a lot of other ways you can be fingerprinted so that really isn't a huge benefit.
I like how it's more decentralised but still feels easy to use, and also has no ads and isn't controlled by companies trying to make money. I also love how it is easy to curate a feed with only content that you want in it, and none that you don't being shoved in by algorithms that collect all your data
Try a different Matrix client like Sable or Commet, they have much better ux than element. Element is honestly a pretty garbage matrix client when it comes to the ui and ux
Do you use a vpn? I had this same bug as well and split tunneling voyager out of my VPN fixed it. I think it might be an issue with some piefed instances like zip and blahaj since I was able to login with piefed.social over my VPN fine, but not with zip.
Other clients i've used in the past have supported most of these, if you take a look at the Piefed mobile client wiki here: https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app, you can see Interstellar in particular supports alot of those. They are in the api
I like the Voyager ui alot. I did try Blorp on mobile and liked it too but I like the voyager ui more than having the extra features. I've also switched back to using Piefed ui after they introduced some new themes that make me like the ui enough to use it when combined with the fact it has all the latest Piefed features
It's nice for you that the instances being blocked just so happen to be ones you don't like, but did you not consider that there's probably alot of people who don't have issues with those instances and don't find them toxic. Your personal blocklist is there so you can curate your own feed, and that is not what the instance blocklist is for and they aren't and shouldn't be treated like the same thing. Tldr, just block an instance in your personal blocklist and move on, no need to make it everyone else's problem.
I think there's no problem unless you can't opt out of them, automatic updates are convenient for a lot of people like me, who forgets to check for updates to things
I did it because it is cheaper, lets me learn a bit about self hosting and causes me to have less captchas and less websites blocking me, and its also more resistant to any potential VPN bans (my country's already made social media have age verification, I'm sure they'll come for vpns eventually). You're right that I don't have the benefit of blending in but there's still a lot of other ways you can be fingerprinted so that really isn't a huge benefit.