"Are you always this quiet?"
"It usually takes me some time to be comfortable around new people."
I've found that people are usually quite understanding and make an effort to include you in conversations if you just be honest with them instead of being snarky.
https://feddit.de/instances says we are blocked. I think it's still possible to view and interact with feddit communities from our instance, but those interactions do not propagate to the feddit server.