Okay so I finally decided to just post and ask directly rather than keep second-guessing what I read elsewhere.
Finding an active community with decent moderation is harder than it sounds. A lot of platforms that looked promising turned out to be full of bots or completely dead. Real community feedback tends to be more useful than any review site for this.
The freemium model is pretty standard now — genuinely free features exist but they're usually limited to browsing.
The specific things I'm trying to nail down:
- Privacy policy and data handling practices
- How easy is it to cancel if needed?
- Geographic distribution of active users
- Quality of any verification system
Would really appreciate hearing from people who have actually used these and can give honest feedback rather than just repeating what the marketing says.