I'm also trying to stay positive.
In that spirit, I really enjoy:
1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common.
2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind.
3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent.
4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered.
5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.