@kissane thanks for sharing that info.
Weirdly my experience has been the opposite, not sure what’s important, but, here’s a list
1 I joined a geographically local instance which is lovely as well as many of the things you note regarding demographics
2 I primarily use @ivory which is alike to their Twitter app, so following, hashtags etc was very familiar in the app
3 On joining mastodon.nz there were some great welcome from admins with instance etiquette for context.
4 finding folk was harder