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I definitively agree with the premise of the suggestion, but instead of getting rid of all/most additional input fields and instead of making it a per-instance/per-community thing (which both are generally good ideas), I'd go a step further and suggest to make it a *per-user* thing.

Mastodon has this feature, where every user gets four pairs of key-value-pairs which they can fill with arbitrary values. If it is a link—great, Mastodon will render it as such[^1].

![Mastodon profile metadata editor with the four pairs of entries (label/content) as described above](https://meta.codidact.com/uploads/8hgmpw7ne08rx9n819j85ttz993a)

They are then displayed at the bottom of your profile (for my profile the metadata are the wwww.luap42.de, the verified website and the alignment)

![Mastodon profile metadata view with some example metadata and data types](https://meta.codidact.com/uploads/6qm5yoegfdxurj9iydghm2949p9z)

I think this might be a good solution, because it gives maximum flexibility and customization. Maybe users don't want to post links to social media but instead want [a link to their favorite music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ), maybe they want to signify their pronouns, maybe they want to make a silly joke. *Maybe they want to do all of that, because that would, too, be possible*.

I opine that this is the best solution for ease of implementation (it's literally just eight text fields in the database) for ease of use (it's literally just eight input fields) and for powerfullness of features (it's literally eight input fields you can write arbitrary stuff into). I don't really see any disadvantage, if there are inappropriate contents they can be moderated away as any other profile contents.

[^1]: Also Mastodon has this really nice feature where you can "verify" the link if there is a matching `<a rel="me" href="{profile url}">` element on the page, but this shouldn't be a top priority.