@flookerton the point is to provide a default that will satisfy the vast majority of users without having to tinker further, otherwise we get people who don't really know what they are doing coming in and trying strange things
the base-full package is intentionally set up in a modular way so that some (or even all) components can be omitted as needed, there are no hard deps so one gets all the control they want, it's just done in a way that you really have to declare that you want it that way
@flookerton i'm aware that the documentation for it is not the best right now but that's what you can expect from a distro in this stage of development
also the reason your posts are getting hidden is that a lot of instances mute mastodon.social (including mine) due to influx of spam accounts from there
you'll encounter the same thing with many others so i suggest finding a better instance