Usually the kinds of people who can direct harassment at you go for the lowest hanging fruit, so any amount of obfuscation or barrier will deter most of them, u

Usually the kinds of people who can direct harassment at you go for the lowest hanging fruit, so any amount of obfuscation or barrier will deter most of them, unless you're a very high profile target (i.e. you're Keffals). The entire model doesn't even rely on being entirely undiscoverable - the point is that you don't need to step back from public life because a bunch of weirdos like stalking you, it can be as easy as having a publicly visible profile with a lock on it. This prevents following, but unlike Twitter you're not entirely excluded from making public posts that anyone can interact with. You can just do a baseline of filtering when accepting followers and deciding which posts to make public or private. You'd be surprised how many of these stalkers and harassers can't make a profile that passes a basic "vibe check" - they either try too hard at putting together a profile or they don't bother at all. Fedisearch and related projects are frowned upon because they would make it much more trivial to find people who are not yet targets based on a soundbite and to go through someone's "permanent record" (most implementations do not backfill posts made before the user was initially followed from an account on the same instance).